


The Archer. The Prey. (Sequel to Heirs of the Sun)

by stardustsroses



Category: Throne of Glass Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: F/M, Original Character(s), Throne of Glass, evangeline x hollin, hollin x evangeline, tog gen 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2020-07-30 14:17:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20098570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustsroses/pseuds/stardustsroses
Summary: SEQUEL TO HEIRS OF THE SUN || Inspired by the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s The Archer. || They say with great power, comes great responsability. Here’s the part they don’t tell you: with great power, comes great loneliness, too. And the Prince of Adarlan knows loneliness all too well. warnings: mentions of depression/mild mentions of abuse





	1. Chapter 1

The stars are traitors.

I try to find in them the answers to questions I have yet to ask myself, but nevertheless, whenever I seek their council, they choose to ignore me.

I used to find all my answers in the night skies; found my relieved breath in calculations and galaxies, physics and stars. Everything made sense. Everything had an explanation.

And now…

Now not even those stars can bring me any sort of relief or consolation.

I wake before dawn and pace in my chambers. Sometimes it is the leftover pain in my body that keeps me sharply awake. Sometimes it is the shadows. Today, it seems, it is both: my blood thrums with energy, making the hairs on my arms stand, my hands shake, and my teeth clatter. I walk to the basinet in the unlit bath chamber, wash my face with cold water, and stare at my hollow reflection in the mirror on the wall, seeing only contours and shadows.

So many shadows.

I run a hand through my jaw, thinking I need to shave.

I press a hand to my unsteady heart, thinking I need to seek Evangeline.

I do one of those things.

I shave in candlelight, the room dimly lit. I make myself bleed several times and curse several times more. I take breaths. I take seconds. I wait for a dawn that never seems to come.

I prepare my own bath, sink into it, and let the water submerge me.

The calmness of it all – of being surrounded by water, feeling your ears empty, hearing nothing but the quiet sensation of your heart beating...I wonder if this is what is like to perish. Serenity.

I break the surface, pull the hair out of my eyes. Blink slowly.

I am not who I used to be.

I am somehow better, yet somehow worse. A monster wearing the skin of a Prince.

I wake in the middle of the night and repeat the process. Every. Single. Day.

Wake. Pace. Shave. Bathe. Pace. Worry. Worry. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I need to breathe. _Evangeline. Evangeline. Evangeline._

I move out of the bath as the sun begins to rise. Somehow, water always helps. My blood cools. The shadows fade, even if only temporarily.

I fit into the role of a Prince like I fit into a tight waist coat.

When I come back to my room only in my briefs and undershirt, I find a maid already pressing down my clothes for the day. Immediately, her eyes shift back to the floor as she bows her head and mutters a quiet, “Good morning, Your Highness.”

I can feel her fear, even from where I am standing.

She is not the first, certainly. Every person who comes into this room looks at me as if I might somehow combust and take this whole world and everyone in it with me.

They are right to be afraid, because they are not wrong. I could.

The maid hurries with her task, smoothing over the lines of my trousers, until a knock on the door makes her jump. It is from the other room adjacent to my bedroom, and with a quiet apology, she disappears around the connecting archway without ever letting her eyes rise to mine.

I hear voices.

I pause, hearing my heart drum in my ears.

The conversation is over too soon, just as I expect it, and then the maid comes back and begins to dress me with shaking hands. I observe her young face with well-contained boredom. At least I hope it _is_ contained. 

“Who was it at the door?” My voice is dry as I ask it, because I know who it is.

She begins buttoning my shirt and cautiously pauses. “It was Lady Evangeline, Your Highness.”

“Did she say what she wanted?”

She shakes her head, dark hair falling over her face as she finishes my collar. “No, Your Highness. Although…” and then she stops.

“Go on,” I calmly say, angry at myself and my own desperation.

“I…” the girl pauses. “Well, she simply wanted to know how you are, Sir. And she asked about the healer that came yesterday, about how he treated you. She asked if she could see you, and I said you were preparing for the day. She then left.”

“She then left,” I find myself repeating.

The girl puts the waistcoat over me, tightens it, and her mouth twists as if there are many other things she wishes to say. Finally, she caves in: “She looked…very distressed, Sir. And very, very sad. Quite sad indeed. I…thought you would want to know.”

My eyes snap to hers. “Why would I want to know?”

The girl’s hands stop abruptly as she searches for the words. Again, her eyes lower to the ground. “Apologies, Your Highness. I did not mean to insinuate anything.”

“But you did,” I say. “And so does everyone in this castle, it seems.”

The maid bites her lip, and finishes her work. She bows her head, and leaves the room. I sigh, and look to the window.

It has not stopped snowing since the day I woke.

How odd – so much snow this early in the season.

I am almost tempted to believe it is all my doing, this terrible weather. Even if my mind has not commanded my hands to paint the gardens of Adarlan this blinding white. But who knows? I barely understand all that I can do.

I still do not.

I wait for the courage to leave this room. To face the world, and face the stares, and the whispers and the frightened eyes that turn away everytime I walk into a hall full of people.

They have stopped seeing me as a hero, as I hoped they would, and now they see me exactly for what I am – something unpredictable, something dangerous, and something wild. The people do not understand what I did to expel the Valg demons from this world. They do not understand that I share their blood, and thus their power.

Not even my brother understands – although he pretends to.

The day I woke, after Evangeline left, I was conscious enough to feel my brother sit down on my bed, and take me into his arms in a hug. He cried at my shoulder, apologized to me, and asked, _“Why did you not tell me, Hollin? Why?”_

King of a country, and King of making things about him, my older brother.

In my tiredness and in my pain, a simple answer escaped my lips. I told him: “It wouldn’t have mattered. You would’ve sent me away with mother anyway.”

Like a dog he didn’t want to care for anymore.

Not that I needed to say that last part to him – I knew my brother had his guilts, as I had mine.

Still, after that we had a long, tense conversation about what had happened. I told him what I could understand myself, and he longed to know more, to understand how my magic worked. I refrained from explaining the things that I could not, and allowed Dorian only to peek at the parts I deemed worthy of him knowing.

The rest, I kept to myself.

The rest – meaning Evangeline. Meaning my own panic-stricken self that spends half the night wasting away in senseless fear of the nothingness I saw when I destroyed those Valg.

No one would truly understand it. Not even Evangeline.

That is why I had to push her away from me.

Because the conversation with my brother did a lot to enlighten me on my own past and lineage. Not just Valg, but – Mala’s lineage seemed to be in me, too. I just did not know how dominant it was. And understanding this, I understood a lot more things.

For one, I understood that I would not grow old.

“You feel it, don’t you? Changing?” Dorian muttered that afternoon, days later after everything happened, as he sat in my parlour with me, as my body was still too weak to move any further. “You feel that that energy can power you through twenty lifetimes. Or more.”

I did feel it. I do.

“Hollin,” my brother said after nothing came out of my mouth. “Do you wish to talk about this?”

“No,” I said to him. “No, I don’t wish to talk about it.”

He gave me time, and space, and I was alone, and I wanted that more than anything else. I did not need Evangeline hovering above me with that worry in her eyes, with that fear. I did not need my heart to jump at every possibility of her being near me, because the reality was this: I was dangerous. And worse: I was dangerous to her.

I almost killed her that day.

She almost gave her last breath in my arms.

And I would never – will never – forgive myself for losing that much control over myself and my own power.

Never.

And then again, I did not need Evangeline’s presence to remind me that I would live twenty lifetimes, and she would not.

Another knock comes at the door, and it makes my heart pound, erasing all thoughts from my head. I barely get a hold of my feelings before moving to the parlour, where a white-haired little witch peeks through the open doorway.

My niece cracks me a smile. “Time for breakfast. Papa is calling you.”

I turn to her, sighing impatiently. “Do you not sleep?”

She flashes me a funny look. “It is almost noon.”

I blink – strange, how the passage of time seems to be of no importance to me now.

“Fine,” I tell her. “Get out of my chambers.”

“You cannot be rude to me anymore,” Rhiannon says, smirking devilishly. It hits me all of a sudden how much she resembles my brother in that away. “I am a Princess too, after all. And mama says someday I will be Queen.”

“I wouldn’t care even if you were an Empress,” I tell her, my voice dried like leaves left in the sun.

Rhiannon walks into my chambers, watching my hands. “I have not seen those scars before.”

I put my hands behind my back, frowning at her. “Go away.”

Rhiannon raises an eyebrow. “Where did you get them?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“You do,” she says. “You are my family so you are obligated to tell me everything.”

“I am your uncle and your Prince,” I tell her, sneering. “And I am eleven years older than you.”

“You are old alright,” she laughs then. “Seriously, where did you get them?”

Insistent little brat.

I sigh, and unwillingly show her my right hand. “I burned my hand.”

“Oh,” Rhiannon’s smile fades slightly, and a worried crease forms between her brows. “When you killed all those Valg? When you created that fire?”

I pause, not knowing what to say.

Rhiannon’s voice is very quiet. “Papa once told me a story of years and years before, when he discovered his magic. He said he burned his hands too, once.”

When she approaches me, I almost flinch away. I am to terrified. Afraid that anything will provoke shadows or ice or fire-

But Rhiannon takes hold of my hand and says nothing. And nothing happens.

She says, “Come. I am absolutely starving. And I hear there is hot cakes with lemon drizzle.”

My niece takes me away, and the monster does not have the heart stop her.

***

“We have news.”

Tiredly, I lift my eyes from the bowl of fruit in front of me and, the moment my brother utters those words at the breakfast table in the Great Hall, I mutter, “The witch is pregnant again.”

A great silence echoes in the room until I hear Rhiannon in front of me whisper, “Damn it, I wanted to be the one to say it.”

Both the witch and Dorian look at me. My brother blinks, “You knew?”

I put a grape in my mouth and give Manon a bored glance. “She has been eating more than all this castle combined and she won’t leave your side for two seconds. The eating, well, I could get past that. But I read witches get awfully clingy when they’re pregnant. Congrats on that, I guess.”

Manon throws me a smirk that clearly says where she would like to bury my body. “Careful, little Prince. I might eat you next and leave the bones for the dogs.”

I eye her once as I sip my tea. “You can try.”

Dorian looks between us with his brows furrowed; my brother knows enough of my relationship with his wife to understand that our threats are vaguely empty.

At least mine are.

“I thought it was rare,” I say, because the silence is making me jittery, “for witches to have children.”

“It is,” Manon says.

“We have been luckier than most,” Dorian says, and when I look up, he’s looking at Manon and she is looking at him and I want to vomit the little food I’ve yet to fully digest.

Rhiannon suddenly bursts out, “EVANGELINE!”

My heart drops. I instinctively look over.

She stands there in her long-sleeve winter dress, cream and dark blue lacing together, a bow tying half her hair up. She stops once she meets my eyes, and then her attention is deviated to the girl wrapping her arms around her waist.

Evangeline smiles, and I am in shambles.

I find my brother looking straight at me, and I school my features into subordination. My heart too.

“Hello,” she takes Rhiannon in a hug, squatting down to her height. “Look at you, so radiant. I have not seen you in days!”

Rhiannon smiles. “I’ve been with mama in the Witch Kingdom, and we returned today. You look so pretty, Evangeline!”

Evangeline laughs as if she does not believe it, and then raises herself to her full height. I take a breath, two, and thankfully, Dorian has the sensibility to speak for me.

“Sweetheart, sit and eat with us,” he gestures to the seat beside mine.

Evangeline looks over at the chair, and nervously clasps her hands together. “Oh, I have already eaten, thank you.” And then somehow her eyes cross mine as she murmurs, “I eat very early.”

Because I know that. Because we both share that.

Or _used_ _to_, at least.

Thankfully, she breaks eye contact before I can and says to both Manon and Dorian. “I just wanted to say congratulations to you both. I just heard.”

If you have never seen a smile on the Witch Queen’s face, be glad.

For it is the most terrifying thing.

Yet as she nods her head at Evangeline, I can feel a strange gentleness from her. Witches really do transform when they are with child.

“Thank you,” Dorian says, his smile as bright as the sun. “I hear congratulations are in order for both Lys and Aedion, too.”

“That’s right,” Evangeline beams, and my whole brain collapses in on itself. “I will be visiting them tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow already?” Dorian cocks his head to the side. “But we can still count on you for the Winter’s Ball, I hope?”

Evangeline pauses, her smile fading slightly.

“Oh, please, please, Evangeline, please come!” Says Rhiannon, tugging on her hand. “It will be such a great celebration.”

Evangeline chuckles faintly at her, before nodding slightly. “I will see if Lysandra does not need me back at home.”

Then the conversation continues, and I hear none of it.

It becomes background noise.

I shake my head at myself. I pushed her away, and now I am angry that she is leaving?

I feel myself sink lower and lower into that dark hole. Before I think, I am moving. “Excuse me,” I mutter, and make my way out of the Hall, and into the grand staircase, my thoughts swirling.

I do not expect her to follow me, but then I hear her footsteps and I wish to run; I wish to stay. I wish many things, all at once, none of them acceptable.

“Hollin,” Evangeline calls.

I stop mid-step. Against my better wishes, I turn to look down at her.

She slowly climbs the steps, one by one, and I watch the way her curls fall over her shoulders, the pink in her cheeks, the fair lashes that catch the snow’s gleam-

She stops one step before me. She pants, and then seems to stop breathing altogether as her eyes search my face. I wish I saw that terrifying fear in her eyes, same as I did that night when everything happened – it would give me a better reason to leave her.

At last she speaks:

“You are cold again.”

Her voice breaks slightly at the last word.

“I am not any different,” I say.

“That is a lie and you know it,” she says back, shaking her head. “I have been visiting you. I am worried for you. You turn me away always-“

“I have been indisposed.”

She pauses, looking into my eyes, watching the lies weave themselves there. Astute, clever, beautiful Evangeline.

“The healer did not speak to me, either,” she says. “Are you-“

“I’m fine, Evangeline.”

The way I say her name makes her flinch.

She pauses, then bites her cheek, then looks to me again. “You are pulling away from me and I do not know why. I thought-“

“You thought what?” I challenge, narrowing my eyes. “Nothing has changed.”

“Everything has changed,” she raises her voice, and then checks herself, straightening her back. “Hollin, I know why you are doing this-“

I turn away, irritated that she is not making my decision to stay away from her any easier. I walk up the remainder of the steps, trying not to scowl at every ache and pain in my abdomen.

“I know why you’re pushing me away,” she accuses as she follows me, hands lifting her skirts so she does not trip at the fast pace she is taking.

“Of course, you do,” I throw at her. “You always know everything. Always see everything.”

“Yes, yes, I do,” she says, angry now. “I see you and I am not-”

I whirl on her, and she stops dead in her tracks, letting her skirts fall. “You’re not afraid?” I say, a low growl at the back of my throat.

Evangeline watches my face carefully, her lips tightly closed.

“You are not afraid of what you see everytime you go to sleep?” I cannot stop talking. “You are not afraid of the man that almost killed me?”

“You saved my life,” she whispers.

“Almost killed you trying,” I tell her. “Lest you forget it.”

“So you keep reminding me,” she bitterly says.

We stare at each other and then I turn away. Before I can go around a corner, Evangeline steps in front of me and puts a hand to my chest. She is blinking back tears. When she speaks, it is without anger. It is soft, and pleading. “Don’t turn away from me again.”

Somehow the words set me into stone.

Her hand falls away. She says, “You don’t have to put an arrow to my chest everytime I come close. Not anymore.”

For only a moment, it is incredibly funny to me how she believes _I_ am the one holding the bow and arrow.

She has no idea.

“I do,” I find myself saying.

“But why?” She whispers.

I stare at her.

A vase at the end of the hall breaks on the floor.

The red roses once in it fly off into the wall, and then fall away as if cut in red ribbons.

Evangeline watches, unmoving.

A terrible icy wind moves the curtains aside, makes her hair fly into her face. Evangeline finally flinches away.

It satisfies me. It also ultimately makes my heart ache that my theory is proven. She _is_ scared.

“That,” I say calmly, “is why.”

She watches the roses on the floor, the water turning into ice in the rug. Then she turns her eyes to me. “Put them back.”

“I can’t,” I say, anger in my tone. “Don’t you see? I can only destroy.”

I think she might yell at me. I think she might turn away, sobbing into her hands. I think she might attack me, even.

But Evangeline simply stands tall and says, “You do not scare me. If you wish to push me away, then give me a good enough reason.”

“What other reason is there?” I yell at her, hating myself for it, but wanting to make her understand all the same.

Her eyes turn away as if she is ashamed to look at me. And then: “Do you still wish to marry the Princess of Eyllwe?”

The question takes me aback, and I do not respond.

Evangeline approaches, so slowly, close enough that I can smell the scent of her hair and see the freckles on her cheeks. My hands are shaking suddenly, and she knows it. She sees it, as she looks down, and up again.

When she touches my arm, the hallway turns into shadows and nothing but shadows.

Evangeline gasps slightly, clinging to my sleeve, and I am trying to stop it, to push them back in, to stop her from seeing them-

But I cannot.

_Stop stop stop._

Another vase breaks, somewhere. Or a window. I cannot tell.

“Hollin,” I hear her say.

The shadows are so cold. They are chilling my blood, down to my bones. I cannot contain it.

Then I feel her hands at my arms, and her pushing me away. No, not away. Pushing me _to_ her. It is when I open my eyes that I see and sense that her hands have moved to my cheeks and they stay there. I open my eyes to see hers staring at me, wide open, pulling my forehead down to hers. One touch, and the shadows move and fade.

I take a ragged breath, feeling my heart pound.

“Hollin,” she murmurs to me, “I could never be frightened of you.”

“You will,” I say, and it comes out as a threat.

Evangeline strokes my cheeks. “I feel you fading away from me, day by day. And I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”

“There is nothing you can do,” I say, trying to regain my own balance so as to pull myself away from her. Those outbursts cannot happen, I remind myself. If I accidentally hurt her-

Evangeline’s eyes harden, and it looks as if she’s been slapped. “Tell me to come back,” she says to me, her nose touching mine. I could give up my life to kiss her. “Tell me that when I leave tomorrow, you will have me in your heart and you will not wish for me to leave it.”

My eyes flutter closed. “I will hurt you.”

“You will never hurt me,” she murmurs, so sweetly. I am overcome. “Never, Hollin.”

I have to place my hand above her head, leaning against the wall, so as to keep myself standing. The healer – the healer had told me never to summon my powers willingly or unwillingly, for it would weaken my already weak state. I have not yet recovered, I remind myself, every little bit of emotion can trigger a burst of power, and a burst of power could hurt her.

“Evangeline,” I say her name then, and hate myself for not being strong enough to leave her, like I should. Selfishness will always be part of my character, it seems. It will never abandon me.

I feel her body against mine, and I do not know if she was the one to press against me, or if I pressed her against the wall. No matter. The shadows do not seem to bother her. I am surprised, and slightly afraid, and even more confused.

She touches her lips to my cheek and I am gone.

My mind goes back to that night – the soothing sensation of her kiss, the moment I realized that I hadn’t actually ended her life, that she was alright and breathing and looking up at me, and that those were her eyes, her own beautiful eyes, and not the Valg’s. My body trembles.

“I see how you do not sleep,” she says to me, so low, like we are the only two people in the world. “I see how you barely keep food down. I see your fear, and your nervousness, and your panic. I see it, Hollin. And I am here.”

_I am here._

“You promised me,” she says.

They strike a chord deep within, those words.

“You don’t know what I’ve seen,” I tell her, resisting, resisting so hard the urge to claim her lips, to roam my hands over her waist. “You don’t know what I did back there. You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

“Then tell me,” she begs. “Tell me, so I can understand.”

“You will never understand.”

“Try me,” Evangeline says. “Have I ever run from you? Have I turned away? I almost lost you then. I saw you fall to the grass and I saw you unconscious in your brother’s arms. You were sweeping in and out of consciousness for days. You saved my life, Hollin. And you expect me to run? You are not a monster. And I am not some prey.”

I search her eyes.

I know the colour by heart.

I know her by heart.

I clench my hands into fists so I stop myself from reaching out and touching her, to feel the softness of her skin. Instead, I force myself to push away from her. I force myself to say, “A prey never knows it is a prey until a monster has his jaws on its neck.”

I begin to pull away.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

I look to her.

“Do you plan to marry the Princess?”

I could easily hurt her, as well.

But the difference is clear. I know the Princess will not have the same effect on me as Evangeline does. My emotions will not surpass a level of calmness around her, and my powers will not be triggered. I may never have to get too close to her except when it is time to produce an heir. If it is good for Adarlan-

I pause. I choose not to answer, and Evangeline does not ask again.

When I leave, she leaves.

And not another word is said between us.

***

My brother sends for tea and cakes.

“Do I have a reason to welcome you in my parlour?” I ask him, rubbing my temples as I feel the beginnings of a headache. “I have had a terrible day, and I am not in the mood.”

Dorian sits opposite of me, lounging. He shrugs. “I simply wanted to talk.”

“Then go on,” I gesture. “This will surely be very high on my list of, _Entertaining Things that Happened to me Today_.”

Dorian forms a small smile, and blows slowly on his tea. “Since when have you and Evangeline…?”

I raise my brows, almost dropping my own tea. My brother has never been one to be frank with me, or this straightforward. It surprises me how amused he looks.

“There is nothing.”

“Please,” Dorian makes a careless gesture with his free hand. “I could practically feel you fuming over breakfast. I may have been gone for a few weeks, Hollin, but I am also not blind.”

“Pray tell, where is this _entertaining_ conversation going?”

My brother’s expression turns serious. “Why did you ask for my blessing to marry the Princess of Eyllwe?”

“Should I repeat to you the royal protocol?” I drily ask. “You are King, I am the youngest, thus I need your approval even if I simply have to take a shit-“

Dorian says, “Don’t avoid the question. You clearly care deeply for Evangeline. But you want to rush into a marriage of convenience for nothing?”

“Adarlan-“

“Adarlan has no needs for allies, Hollin. They are certainly useful, but not needed. What I said to you on that note remains true. I will not have you marry just for the sake of it. Not if you do not want to.”

“It is my choice,” I say, irritably.

My brother raises his hand in defeat. “Alright, alright. Fine. But I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Anything else?”

“I want to train you.”

“You want to _what_?”

“Train you,” my brother repeats. “You are restless, and so is your magic. I can feel it. You have almost recovered, and I think you could only benefit from my help. Maybe then you wouldn’t be so afraid to be in the same room as her.”

I give him a look of reproach. “Are you seriously trying to set us up?”

Dorian finally smiles. “Why not? I saw how she looks at you.”

I put my tea down, almost breaking the whole damn thing. I brace my elbows on my knees and lean in, watching my brother carefully. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

Dorian blinks at me.

“I almost _killed_ her that day.”

He sighs. “She told me what happened when you were recovering, Hollin. You lost control – but you were saving her. Evangeline was by your side day and night, holding your hand, reading to you. She never left. She worried. She _yelled_ at the nurses everytime they left you alone for more than five minutes. Have you ever even heard Evangeline scream at someone before?”

_Holding your hand, reading to you._

My throat closes up. “What do you suppose I do? Proclaim my love for her, propose, allow her to have my children, and then, what? She dies and I keep living as if I never aged a day? What of our children? Will they be like me and you? Will they have this…this decease flooding their veins? And worse – what if someday I am trying to kiss her, and instead I send a blast of shadows that kill her?”

“That will not happen, Hollin,” Dorian says sadly. “Evangeline…she will accept you for who you are. Talk to her. Everyone around her will surpass her life, she knows it. You don’t know if, given the chance, she would have you and an immortal life by your side. There is always the bond oath. The purest magic there is. Like Lorcan and Elide-“

I get up, pacing around. “You don’t know. You don’t know that. She will never accept it.”

My brother stares at me, and then lifts himself up, touching my shoulder. “That is why we will train everyday. It will stop you from being so frightened of your own power. You will learn to let it out, to keep it in. Most importantly, you will learn to control it.”

“Even then, there is always the chance-“

“Your problem is that you think two hundred steps ahead. It stops you from living, brother. Who would ever leave you? Look at the man you’ve become – how you’ve grown. What you did the other night-”

I choose to ignore him on that.

“Thinking two hundred steps ahead also protects the people around me,” I mutter.

“It will make you lose what you have with Evangeline, which is special, and should be protected, nurtured. Don’t let it go, Hollin. Now that you’ve found it. Now that you’ve found _her_.”

With that little speech, my brother turns and leaves the room, closing the door softly behind him.

I turn to the window and lean against the windowsill, watching the skies turn dark. I turn my brother’s words in my head, and think that he is absolutely mad in the head. Then my mind turns to Evangeline, to the softness of her lips as she pressed them to my skin, her slow breathing, her eyes, determined as steel, burning into mine, searching for the man she saw once, the man that did not allow her to give up on him.

I sigh at the sky.

I must be mad in the head, too.

Hours away, I turned and left. Hours away, I could have said everything I wanted to say, and allowed her to keep that truth safe in her heart. I could have told her to come back.

_Idiot._

I pace around the room.

_Go see her._

The thought makes the blood rise to my face. Atrocious to think such a thing, bursting into her chambers this late-

_She is awake, you can feel that she is. Go see her._

Fuck.

I pray that she is asleep.

I pray that I find something along the way that makes me stop and turn back around.

But I don’t. My legs lead me to her chambers, and I stop in front of the door, my hands shaking.

I urge the shadows to stay asleep. Stay dormant. Stay invisible.

I urge myself to calm down.

I urge my hand to knock.

Instead, I rest my forehead against the wood, and sigh. I close my eyes.

_“You don’t have to put an arrow to my chest everytime I come close. Not anymore.”_

Gently, so gently, I knock.

Two times, three times.

She does not answer.

My heart beats in my throat.

_Leave, Hollin._

_Go in. Go._

Mad. I must be absolutely mad.

For I gently open the door, and go in.

I find her asleep.

Her hair falls over her sleeping gown, her arms spread on the heavy covers and her head turned uncomfortably to the side. There is an open book opened on her stomach. Her mouth is hanging slightly open.

Enchanted, I approach her slowly.

Then I realize how creepy I am being and stand exactly where I am.

_Then_ I realize how that makes me even more creepy, and find myself moving towards her.

I slowly take the book from her, close it, and place it on her nightstand. She reads romances at night. It’s stupid how adorable I find that.

I wonder what she dreams of.

Sighing to myself, and with careful, delicate movements, I drag her pillow from the tip so her head moves to a more comfortable position. I place the covers over her, sheltering her from the cold. Then I leave.

Or I would have, if her voice had not stopped me.

“Hollin.”

I turn, jumping out my skin.

Evangeline yawns, stretching her legs underneath the covers. She turns to her side, her eyes half-way open. “What is it?” She murmurs.

“I…” I don’t have an answer. Why did I go into her rooms knowing perfectly well she was asleep? “I’m sorry, I wanted-“ I clear my throat. “I needed to…apologize. The way I spoke- I- Well, I could have-“

Her eyes flutter closed and I realize she is not listening to me.

She stretches out an arm, her hand reaching out to me. Dumbstruck, I take it. She entwines her fingers with mine, and tugs at my hand slightly.

I realize what she is silently asking and I die, right here, right now. When I don’t respond, she opens an eye and looks at me. Her sleepy face is-

I die, I die, I die.

“I can’t crawl into bed with you,” I say, uneasy.

Surprisingly, she cracks a lazy smile. “Proper, pompous Prince,” she murmurs into her pillow. “Have you asked me to stay?”

“Are you even awake?”

“Enough to know you are real,” she squeezes my hand. “And not another dream.”

This is wrong, I think. I am contradicting my own damn reasoning doing this.

She tugs at me again, and I end up sitting next to her on top of the covers, as she lays down, her hand clasped in mine.

“I am sorry,” she murmurs, “if I pressured you. I don’t need you to ask me to stay, or come back. I don’t…expect anything. If you wish to marry the Princess of Eyllwe, you’ll marry her. I…I am still here for you. If you ever need a friend.”

My heart clenches. I stare at the ceiling. “You talk an awful lot for someone half-awake.”

“Hm,” she says, and for a moment she doesn’t speak, and I think she has fallen asleep. But then she murmurs, “Your hands. You burned them.”

I look down at our clasped hands. She must have seen them before – and I know she has, with what Dorian said with her always being by my side as I recovered – but she is only asking it now.

“Yes,” I simply say.

She puts my hand to her heart, and it stays there.

It stays there until she falls asleep.

And as I look at her face, at those freckles, the lines of her jaw, the scars forever etched on them…

I think there are very few things in the world I would die for, and Evangeline is one of them.

I think an infinite number of things, but as the dark clouds roll away and show me dark starlit skies, the last thing on my mind is that I want to be the man Evangeline thinks I am.

And that includes not being selfish with her.

Slowly, I pull my hand from hers. I rest hers on the pillow next to her head. She does not even stir as I move off the bed. Nor does she wake when I leave the room.

The stars are traitors.

I thought I had seen my future in them, shining golden and beautiful.

But instead, all the stars gave me was darkness.

And it was only darkness in my path.


	2. Chapter 2

Ever since I was a little girl, I had the strangest dreams.

Battles and dragons and magic and stars. So many dreams about the stars.

I was a girl with a wild imagination and too many fears to count, and that made for a lot of sleepless nights, shaking with fear and sweating away my fevers. Maybe those frightening dreams always came to me as a result of what happened to me. Or maybe the frightening thing is the possibility that my mind conjured all those things on its own.

Tonight, I dream of a Prince with tired eyes and a cold hand pressed to my heart.

I think I speak to him, or try, but my voice comes out groggy and my words fumbled together like a ball of wool. But I feel him wrap the blankets around me, I feel him keep away the cold. I tell him to stay. I think he does. At least for a little while.

And then, soft darkness.

Dreams of him, of eyes like a dark ocean awaiting a storm.

And the worst part of it all- is that I love those dreams.

I cling to them like I cling for air, holding on with white-knuckled hands and trembling lips. Almost always, I wake with the strange sensation of my skin being set on fire. This morning, it seems, is no exception.

Beads of sweat cover my temples and I shove the covers off me, feeling my nightgown cling to my body. I begin to move the sticky fringe off my eyes, until I look to my side. The book I remember reading yesterday, neatly sitting atop my nightstand, perfectly positioned.

So he’d really been here.

The heat moves to my cheeks, and I have to stifle a gasp at what I can recall, distinguishing dream from reality.

I practically asked him to lay with me. In my bed.

And then a thought that makes me impossibly giddy – he’d come here on his own. To see me.

I fall back onto the bed, my hands on my face.

How wrong it all is – feeling such a way for him, having my heart beating out of my throat at the mere thought of how close Hollin had been to me. I faintly remember the way his eyebrows had furrowed as he contemplated my half-awake form: with careful intent, and soft, tender eyes. As if he’d been fighting with himself all night.

Soon enough, I realize how ridiculous I am being, and promptly move off the bed to wash myself. I’d sworn to myself that I would let him go once I was ready to leave for Caraverre. And maybe…

Maybe that is what I should be focusing on.

Seeing Lysandra and being with her and Aedion again as a family. Celebrating the brother and sister I would soon meet. Celebrating the end of the Valg.

That’s right. Being away from Adarlan will do me good. All I truly need is to be away and put things into perspective. Surely after a few weeks, my heart will steady, and my mind will forget all about the Prince and his eyes. It is what is right. And decent. He, along with his memory, will fade away into the back of my mind, never to come to the surface again. And by that time, he will be married to the Princess, and all will be settled and alright in the world again.

As I think of this, a terrible sadness dawns on me. I shake it away, put on my warmest dress with a fur collar, and make my way downstairs.

In the Great Hall, I only find Dorian.

I can’t help wonder if Hollin is already awake. If he has eaten. If he has slept well-

_Stop it, _I tell myself, angry and full of disapproval for my own mind. _He is not your concern anymore._

The king gives me a gentle smile, nibbling on a piece of toast as he reads through a lengthy letter.

“Good morning,” I say as I sit down. “All alone today?”

Amusement flashes in his eyes. “My dearest wife and daughter decided it would be best to spent the rest of the morning in bed.”

“Ah, good on them,” I say. “The weather is awfully cold, anyway. The question is: why are you not with them, resting like you should?”

Dorian chuckles softly. “When will you stop trying to care for everybody, sweetheart?”

I shrug, reaching for some porridge. “When the people I love begin to properly take care of themselves. Which may be never.”

Before Dorian can tease me back, I ask him: “How is Manon fairing?”

The king sighs softly, putting his letter down. “A lot of nausea. A lot of…irritable moods.”

I sympathize with him, gently patting his arm. “She kicked you out of the bed, did she not?”

Dorian pouts. “She really did.”

I smile. “Give her time. I hear witches have a hard time in the first trimester of pregnancy.”

“That is true. I remember when she was pregnant with Rhiannon in those first months Manon tore down a forest,” he laughs, but it is full of tenderness and love. I find myself watching him with incredible admiration, wishing, from the depths of my heart, that I had someone to speak of me to others as fondly as Dorian speaks of his wife. “But how are _you_ fairing?”

I eat my porridge slowly, enjoying its warmth. “I’m okay.”

Dorian keeps watching me. I raise my eyes to meet his, and find him completely serious. “Why don’t I believe you?”

Something in the way Dorian gazes at me tells me he knows more about what has been happening in this castle than I initially realize. “I…” I begin, but shut my mouth, and then force the words out of me. “I really am fine, Dorian.”

The king narrows his eyes slightly, and his lips move as if he’ll ask something else, but then he stops, and looks up.

So do I. A mistake.

Hollin stands there, watching us. He is immaculate in his dark suit, a turtleneck shielding him from the cold walls of the palace. The prince stands with his hands behind his back, his face pale in the morning light. I want to sink into this chair and never have his eyes on me ever again.

When he looks me over, his face is too calm, too serene. He is all too composed. All too perfect. Cold. My stomach sinks.

“Brother,” Dorian says, his voice easy, even, cheerful, “sit with us.”

Hollin’s eyes meet his brother’s, and they stare at each other for a few silenced moments, as if having a secret conversation.

“Do you wish me to leave?” I ask politely, but my voice is too small.

“No,” they both say at the same time.

Hollin hesitates, and Dorian tries again: “I thought you and I could take the horses on a ride today. It’s been a while since we’ve done-”

“Actually,” Hollin’s voice fills the entire hall as he tilts his head towards me. “I would like to speak to Evangeline.” Then he lowers his eyes, meeting mine, every bit of him unreadable.

The air leaves my lungs, and I am distinctly reminded of his body pressed against mine, my hand feeling the gentle roughness of his jawline.

“If you’ll allow it,” he says to me, too curtly.

“Alright,” is all I manage to say, moving off the chair, my porridge left to freeze.

We move down the hallway side by side, unspeaking, my eyes on the floor, his own far away, unfocused. I am too lost in my own thoughts and only realize we are making our way outside to the gardens when I pass the huge double doors and feel the winter air kiss my cheeks, freezing me down to my bones, despite my thick dress.

For a moment, we just walk.

It feels companionable, this silence. Peaceful. I resist the terrible urge to reach for his hand. He stops near the winter roses, their petals covered in white.

I stop too, watching him expectantly.

How odd, that we both ended up here. How odd that he manages to set me ablaze even without ever lifting a finger to touch me.

“You were with me last night, weren’t you?”

I say the words before I think them through.

The question does not make him react. Hollin barely moves.

“I was,” he admits.

I want to ask him so many things. Ask him _for_ so many things. Instead, what leaves my mouth is a soft, “Why didn’t you stay?”

But all I want to truly ask is_, Come back. Come back to me. Do not build walls around yourself again. Please. Please._

“I couldn’t stay,” he says gravely.

“Then why did you go?”

He pauses, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “The point was to say goodbye to you, Evangeline.”

That hurts more than it should have.

I wrap my arms around myself, truly feeling the cold this time. “I could never say goodbye to you, not truly. Not at all. And I refuse to. I won’t.”

My previous resolution flies out the window the moment he looks at me with those eyes. I might have been willing to forget him in the act of my own loneliness, but now that he is here, so cold and so beautiful, so sad and so broken, I feel as if it is the last thing that I might do.

I dare to take a step. “And I don’t think you could say goodbye me, either.”

Hollin turns his eyes away, pulling at a flower petal as if he might tear the whole thing off. “I can’t, Evangeline.”

“Can’t what?”

I ask because I need to hear it from him. I need my heart to hear him.

A pause, and then those blue eyes, so pale against the snow, turn to me. “Everytime I look at you I see you dead in my arms.”

Another step. Two. He almost flinches. “You didn’t kill me, Hollin.”

He gives me a bitter smile. “You don’t know how close I got.”

I walk to him then, my hands at his chest, angry and urgent and desperate for him to understand. “I am here _because_ of you. Do you not _see_ that?”

I feel his hands at my shoulders, shaking me. “Stop,” he shouts, almost a growl. “See me for what I really am, damn you.” His voice cracks at the end, his fingers tightening on my shoulders as if he is stopping himself from pulling me into his arms. He does not know how much I want to fall into him.

I look into his eyes, see the boy who hurt me and the boy who saved me. And I know I love them both. “I do. I see you.”

He shakes his head, his eyes wild and confused. Angry. His hands drop.

“You didn’t answer me.”

He looks at me.

“You didn’t answer me yesterday,” I say again, my hands beginning to sweat despite the cold. “Are you pushing me away because of…because you still intend to marry?”

Surely, the princess of Ellywe is still coming to the Winter’s Ball in a few weeks. But I cannot help but wonder whether Hollin’s feelings remain the same. It is funny to think that his feelings for her were what got us closer in the first place. Every moment spent together, trying to get him to open up so he could charm another woman-

And yet I am the one who fell.

Hollin shakes his head again, as if he thinks I might be insane. “I am not marrying anyone, Evangeline.”

A knot ties itself around my throat. “Why not.”

“Do you think I would want a wife in my bed when there’s a possibility she might wake up dead?”

The knot tightens. “You wouldn’t do that,” I breathe.

“Maybe not,” he shrugs, that cruel glint in his eyes returned. “Or maybe I will have a fit in the middle of the night and the shadows will devour her.” A cynical laugh. “Who can prevent it? Certainly not me.”

“I know your brother is training you, helping you.”

“Training me like a dog that cannot behave,” he scoffs. “You cannot teach a snake not to bite, just as much as you cannot teach a Valg not to destroy.”

I push at his chest again, and he almost stumbles. “Do _not_ speak of yourself like that,” I shout at him, part of myself surprised at my own outburst, another part urging me to scream louder. “You could never be one of them-”

“It’s in my blood!” He shouts back. “You don’t know the things it wants me to do. You don’t know what it is like being in my mind. You know nothing. You should be miles from here, away from me, and yet you keep putting yourself in danger by coming close-“

My hands clench into fists. “Then I ask you again: why did _you_ come into _my_ room last night? You want me to stay away?” I scoff. “You’re not doing a better job yourself.”

Hollin closes his mouth, stunned at my argument. He clenches his jaw, turns his face away, and says, “I was selfish. I shouldn’t have gone. I wanted…I want-“ He sighs, closes his eyes, shakes his head.

A man defeated. Tired. 

My face relaxes, my fists open. My heart clenches in my chest, as if someone had landed a punch in the middle of my back.

Before I know what I am doing, I come close, so close, until our breaths mingle, until I can smell the soft scent of his clothes, the soap on his skin, and see the tiny little ingrown hairs at his shaven jaw. His head is bent low, eyes turned away, body tense. I watch him expectantly, curiously, entranced by his own reaction of my closeness.

“Look at me,” I say.

He does not.

“Please,” I ask.

Hollin turns his eyes to mine, dark brows furrowed, jaw squared.

“_Darkness_,” I quote, “_is the only way to see the stars. For if the universe was anything but a dark canvas, the light could never be seen.”_

As I speak, he blinks slow, certainly recognizing the words of an old script we read together, in one of his lessons. I know it by heart, for it is one of the many passages Hollin has scribbled over his notebooks, it is circled with ink in that very old script from that very old scholar whose name I no longer recall.

I tell him, “I have seen your darkness, and your stars, and I want them both.”

He breathes and our breaths are seen as clouds of white smoke. I see it now, in his eyes, how much he truly wants to give in, to let that darkness go. And the darkness does not let go. It clings to him, wanting to tear him to pieces.

“I meant what I said,” I murmur to him, looking up into those eyes. “You don’t need to point arrows at my chest. You don’t need to be alone anymore. Neither of us does.”

The prince tries to find the words to refute my own and fails.

“What have you come to tell me?” I ask then, my voice a whisper, as I look up at him. “Go on.”

He cannot say it.

“Hollin…”

He swears then, the ugliest of swearwords, also under his breath, and it almost makes me laugh. Until he looks at me, his eyes searching mine, and every other thought takes a boat and moves to an unknown land, making me forget about it almost immediately.

“Why is it so difficult to part with you?” He whispers.

His forehead touches mine, and I almost let out a strangled sound. I gravitate closer and closer, until he and I are the same, two stars wrapped around each other.

“I am not sure I can answer that,” I breathe a laugh, and a nervous tingle moves its way down my spine the moment I feel one of his arms wrap around my middle.

He opens his eyes to me, pulling his face back slightly. “You _terrify_ me.”

A snowflake falls into his hair, quickly melting off. Until another falls, and another, and another. Pearly white against ebony curls.

“Do I?” I say to him, smiling.

A softness crosses his eyes. “I am not good, Evangeline.”

“None of us are. We are all a mixture of good and bad, of darkness and light. It is how we wield our darkness that matters,” I tell him.

He rolls his eyes at that in his typical smile, and then he says, “What if darkness is all that I am?”

“It’s not.” 

“How can you be sure-“

I touch a hand to his lips, a bold move, one that seems to surprise him slightly. Heat blooms in my cheeks as I tear my hand away. “You are not all darkness. I know it. I see you.”

He sighs softly, and before he can look away, I raise my hand once more, and touch his cheek.

My eyes fall closed as he approaches, closing the only distance between us, but when I think he might kiss me, I feel his lips at my forehead, lingering.

It is a gesture so sweet, so gentle, that I break in half, and that half is carried away with the winter breeze, buried in the snow for no else to find. Gone, gone, gone forever.

I rest my head on his chest, and his chin is on top of my head, and I could stay here, feeling the heat of his body against mine, for the rest of my life.

That does not last quite the time I expect, for before I know it, a cough makes us pull away from each other.

Hollin let’s out a, “Fucking gods above and all their fucking-“

Before we both turn and see little Rhia there, watching us very much unimpressed, still in her nightwear and her father’s boots that end at her thigh.

“What are you doing here?” Hollin says drily.

She crosses her arms, watching mine and Hollin’s closeness. Under her child’s gaze I feel immediately the shame reveal itself in my cheeks, and I wish to dig myself a hole in the snow and stay there.

“Are you two getting married now, as well?”

Hollin and I look at each other.

“No, no,” I stumble over my words.

And Hollin is saying: “Mind your own business, witch.”

“You looked like you were ready to get married,” Rhiannon accuses, narrowing her eyes. “What is next, another baby?”

I must look horrified.

“Where’s your mother?” Hollin sneers.

“Right here, little prince,” Manon’s voice comes from my side, and I turn, jumping slightly at how close she is. How silent she is. “Rhiannon, you said you were meeting your father.”

“Witch, would you do me the favour of handling your cub?” Hollin mutters irritably.

Manon and him share a look, and I am almost tempted to step between them.

“I was!” Rhia suddenly responds, gesturing wildly. “Until I saw _this_.”

Manon’s eyes look over at me and Hollin, as if we were not a novelty.

“Go inside,” Manon’s voice is filled with a mother’s command, soft and warning.

“But mother-!”

“I am not asking,” Manon says to her, raising a brow.

Rhiannon lowers her head, sighing. Then she gives Hollin a very dirty look. “You stay away from Evangeline. She is MY friend first!”

Him and I look at each other again, surprised at her little outburst.

Then Rhiannon runs along, trudging through the snow in her father’s boots, muttering angrily to herself. It is then that Manon turns to me, and only me.

“You have someone here to see you,” she says evenly, but something crosses her gaze that leaves me frightened.

I realize why. I see compassion.

And why would it be Manon warning me of a visitor?

I pause, and then nod. “Alright, I…I will be right there.”

Mon nods once, and then turns to leave through the open double doors. My heart is racing when I face Hollin again.

I touch his hand, silently sorry for the interruption. Hollin responds in kind, bumping his thumb into mine before intertwining our fingers together.

“When do you leave?” He asks me.

“Just a little before noon,” I tell him.

He gives me a ghost of a smile, before dropping my hand. “See me before?”

I nod, unable to speak.

Before I succumb to my impulses and get on my tiptoes to kiss him senselessly, I turn and allow Manon to lead to me through the halls of Adarlan. Nervous at her silence that feels tense and uneasy, I ask her: “Tell me. Is there something wrong?”

Manon looks me over and then sighs as if she would rather not tell me anything at all, in fear of disappointing me. She says, with surprising gentleness: “There is a woman waiting for you. She claims she is your mother.”

***

The wide corridor feels as if it might squash me.

The helpers of the castle begin the preparations for the Ball, beginning weeks earlier to make sure everything is in place, and immaculate, and perfect. I see paper roses dangling off the ceiling, white as birds, and fine vines threading along the columns. As we pass, an old man unfolds a long tapestry etched with Adarlanian colours.

At the end of that hall, standing alone, is my mother.

Manon steps aside, but does not leave. She must sense how much I do not want her to leave me alone. I am so grateful to feel her steady gaze on me.

I think I might shatter.

She is just as I remember. Brown hair and eyes of the same colour; a fine waist and translucent skin. My mother wears a man’s coat and a belt tight around her torso, her boots soggy with snow. She looks at Manon from the corner of her eye, as if in the place of the queen there is a snake ready to strike.

She does not know how right she is.

She takes a step towards me and I am unmoving. Then she smiles kindly.

My mother, too, smiled the day she sold me. It was quite a different smile. Yet still. It reminds me of the day nonetheless.

“Evangeline,” she murmurs, and I wish to crumble.

I am not sure what I should say, what I should do. My mind feels too far away.

I only react when her arms reach out to me. I _flinch_.

Out of habit.

“What are you doing here?” I breathe, cowering under her gaze.

She looks offended and hurt. I notice her cheeks are fuller, her gaze brighter. Crueller.

“I came to see you,” she says, eyeing me and Manon. “I finally found out where you were and I have come to take you home.”

“Take me home?” I repeat, taking another step back – towards Manon.

I only know I have found a haven in the queen when I feel her presence beside me.

My mother looks like she’s been slapped. “Yes, take you home, where you belong. You don’t belong here, Evangeline,” she laughs, and it is as strange and bitter as I remember her laugh to me. “You see your mother after ten years, and yet you treat me like this? As if I am some garbage to be disposed of? As if you barely recognize me?”

I feel Manon tense beside me.

My whole body goes rigid. Frozen.

I do not know how I find the strength to speak, but then the words are falling out of my mouth, slow and small, and I have no way to stop them: “I do recognize you. How could a child forget the mother who sold her?”

My mother’s eyes finally lower. “I made mistakes. I am here to mend them.”

“I don’t remember receiving an apology.”

I think to myself how I managed to sound this cold.

I barely recognize _myself_.

She looks angry.

This – this is the face I recognize.

“Let’s go home,” she commands. “And while you’re at it, you will bring whatever you can to help your family.”

What she says hits me like a stack of bricks falling over me.

“Help?” I murmur. “You are asking me for money?”

“It’s your duty,” she says, looking around. “Look where you live!”

My mouth opens and closes. “Why did you come here? How did you even find me?”

“Word spread since all those people awoke,” she begins. “Word about the prince, and a girl with red curls calling for him. I asked around, so I found you after days and days of walking in the cold-“

“You are liar,” I whisper then.

All goes silent.

Even the birds stop singing.

“You could have found me sooner,” I tell her. “I was with the Queen of Terrasen – I grew up with them, as I grew up in this castle. Everybody knows these courts. I teach at the school in Rifthold. Before you ever heard of that night, you should’ve heard of me. You’ve probably even seen me. But you’ve only figured out where I have been living in the last few weeks, haven’t you? You haven’t come to see me or take me home, mother. You’ve come to ask for money.”

The tears are falling in my cheeks before I can stop them.

I continue, driven by my own anger. “What debts do you owe this time?”

“You little-”

Manon puts herself in front of me. And whatever face she shows at my mother is enough to cower her.

“Careful,” Manon murmurs, soft as a killing brush of a knife. “The only reason why I haven’t spilled your blood is because of your daughter. But you take one more step and I will paint these tones red.”

My mother backs away, until her shoulders touch the entrance doors.

A pause. My tears dry.

“This is my family,” I say. “The one that protects me. The one that cares.” I touch Manon’s arm, urging her to be calm. “I will see to it that there is food on your table. But you will see no coins, not from me, and not from the king and queen of Adarlan.”

My mother is speechless, watching me and Manon back and forth.

“I am not sad,” I tell her, because it is the truth. “I am glad to see you alive, I am. But I will not cry for you, mother. Not anymore. I have found happiness amongst these people, and I will not leave them for anything in the world. Least of all you. I will leave you here, and I will not look behind me. The past is in the past,” I say. “And it has no place in my future.”

A long pause.

I turn, and whisper to Manon, “Please, make sure she is led out of the grounds safely. I do not wish her to return.”

I hear an angry murmur, and Manon barking orders, but the moment I turn around, I stop listening.

I stop thinking.

And despite all the pain I have felt and the memories and the nightmares I have etched in my mind-

I feel as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

Without turning back, I make my way to the tower.

***

Hollin is sat at his desk, scribbling over a journal.

When he sees me, he shoots up from his seat and walks to me, his composure gone. It is as if he’s forgotten himself.

It is then that I realize what a mess I must look like – and what Hollin can conclude from that.

“What happened?” He asks, watching me closely. And then, “Who was it?”

I look up at him, feeling a sudden, inexplicable urge to sleep. I smile slightly at his concern. “Will you hold me?”

He pauses, watching me with that careful intent of his.

I have to remember that this does not come naturally to him. But moments later I’m making my way to the cot at the corner of his room, next to the small window, and I lay down, waiting for him. Hollin does not seem hesitant, though his brows are drawn.

When his arms are around me, and my head is on his chest, I murmur. “It was my mother.”

Hollin goes very still.

I know he has heard the stories. They all have, one way or another.

So I do not have to say anything else for him to understand.

Surprising even me, Hollin pulls me closer to him.

I am suspended in a moment of bliss, despite what has just happened, what I just heard, and it takes me away from all nightmares in my mind.

“Do you wish to talk?” He asks, so low.

“No,” I say to him, lifting my head so it rests on his shoulder. “There’s no need to. This is just what I need.”

He turns his face lightly, his cheek touching the tip of my nose. He sighs softly, and I feel the gentle up and down glide of his fingers against my sleeve.

“My mother,” he begins, his voice rough and small, “was always a very frivolous woman.”

I raise my eyes to him, surprised at this piece of his life that he’s decided to share. Vulnerability makes him look away, up at the ceiling, instead of meeting my eyes. But Hollin continues speaking, so gently.

He says, “I always felt as if I could do no wrong in her eyes. She blamed me for nothing. Maybe that is part of the reason why I was always such a terrible kid.”

I murmur, “You were not terrible.”

He looks at me and, for a stunning moment, I see that he is smiling. My heart bursts. “This is how I see how nice of a person you are – telling a lie that big so you don’t hurt my feelings.”

I smile sheepishly, and urge him to go on.

“It was when I grew up that I realized that the reason why my mother let everything I did go, was because she didn’t actually bother much. I am not saying that she didn’t love me, but maybe she could’ve loved me more. She could have done more.”

I see that there is no other meaning underneath his words. No second intention. I shared a part of myself, and he is doing the same.

“Do you miss her?” I whisper.

“Sometimes,” he tells me, turning his face to look down at me. “It was worse after the war, when she died. My brother helped. Hell, even the witch helped.”

I watch him, and he watches me. I tell him, “I am glad to have chosen my family.”

Hollin bumps his nose against mine. “I know they are glad that you chose them, too.”

“I chose you, as well,” I tell him, because it’s true and I need him to know.

I feel his hand at my cheek and something inside me comes back to life.

“Close your eyes,” he says.

“Why?” My mouth tugs at the corners.

“Trust me.”

I do.

So my eyes fall closed.

I don’t feel him for a while. I wonder if he is simply contemplating my face. Until I feel his lips touch the side of my face.

I shift slightly, and the urge is to open my eyes and watch him.

“Close your eyes,” he insists, and I do, attempting to keep my heart calm, and steady.

Hollin does it again, leaving a lingering kiss on the side of my face, then on my jaw.

“What are you doing?” I breathe.

“Memorizing,” he simply says, his breath against my skin.

I shudder, not being able to keep a smile off my face. “Liar,” I tell him. “You are distracting me. You don’t want me to feel sad.”

He pauses, before leaning in. I feel his breathing at my ear. “So what if I am? I intent to take full advantage of my selfishness.”

I open my eyes, and realize I am holding on to his coat.

I say, “You are not selfish, Hollin.”

He looks at me, “Being here with you is a selfish need. We both know I could easily lose control-“

I tell him, “It is not selfish if I want to be here, too.”

_If I want you, too._

Hollin observes my face, as if knowing he has been defeated. “I was not done.”

I breathe a laugh, and promptly close my eyes. “Demanding.”

I feel his smile against my cheek as he kisses it. The side of my nose, and both my eyelids. The novelty of his kisses on my skin steals the air from my lungs, and I am out of breath as soon as his lips move to my jawline. If I would have ever dreamed we would end up here, stealing kisses from each other, I would have found myself completely mad.

Yet, here we are.

I can barely hold myself together until I feel his lips a breath away from mine, his warm breath already leaving the sweetest of kisses over my parted lips.

He says, “I am completely and unequivocally at your feet.”

The words make me open my eyes, but then I feel the soft press of his lips against my own.

My hand touches the back of his neck, feeling the thick curls there. I feel him gasp softly against my mouth as I weave my fingers through the hair, and my answering smile makes him pull away to stare at me.

“So,” I say, breathless, and with cheeks blazing, as I caress the back of his head, “this is soft spot for you.”

He breathes a laugh, and I am momentarily at a loss for words at his smile.

Hollin looks at me, his smile fading slightly.

“What’s wrong?” I murmur.

“My brother’s coming.” His eyes move to the door.

We unhappily entangle ourselves from each other, and as the door opens, Hollin is sat at his desk reading, while I am sitting next to him, at a polite distance away, a book opened in my lap.

I know we fool no one.

Much less Dorian.

Thankfully, the king’s gentle smile suggests nothing. He simply says, “Evangeline, your carriage is here. I have taken the freedom of asking Mr. Aslo to fetch your bags.”

Hollin and I share a look, hopefully too quick for his brother to notice.

I’d almost forgotten it was time to go home.

***

Manon and Dorian see me off.

I hug them both – this time, I hug Manon a little tighter.

It is a _thank you_ as much as a _see you later_.

The queen wraps me up in her arms, her cloak billowing behind her. “You lightning strike of a girl. Keep your head up.”

I smile against her shoulder, nodding. “I will.”

I’d already said my goodbyes to Rhiannon, who was terribly, terribly sad to see me go. Once I mentioned Aedion’s famous lemon cakes and that I would love to bring her some, Rhia’s face brightened almost immediately.

Once I pull away from both of them, I see Hollin standing behind.

We stare at each other.

I see Manon pulling Dorian away, and alone we stand.

Hollin says nothing as he offers his hand. I offer him a smile, my gloved hand passing over his cheek in a quick, gentle caress, before I climb up the steps to the carriage. Hollin closes the door and leans over the open compartment, elbows on the doorframe.

“I think they know,” I whisper to him, looking behind him to his brother’s retreating form.

Hollin is amused. It brightens my heart. “Somehow, I know I will not hear the end of it from my brother once you are away.”

We both pause as the time to go comes creeping closer and closer.

He touches my hand and says, “Come back to me.”

_Tell me to come back_, I asked him yesterday.

Hollin kisses my gloved hand, and then says: “I have you in your heart and I do not wish for you to leave it.”

_ Tell me that when I leave tomorrow, you will have me in your heart and you will not wish for me to leave it._

I touch his face, watching him. Hollin leans in over the compartment, and gently presses his lips to mine.

Just a brief brush of his mouth against mine.

I tell him, “Write to me.”

He nods, and kisses my hand again. Then he pulls away.

Hollin signals to the man, and the horses slowly begin to move.

It is when he is out of sight that I realize: we have not said goodbye to each other.

And we probably never will.


	3. Chapter 3

“Stop.”

I feel as if I have taken my first breath after being underwater for a thousand years.

My bones feel heavier than the earth itself, sinking and sinking, like I have been carrying stones in my pockets. The air is whisked out of my lungs the moment I breathe in. I no longer feel as if I have a body. I feel as if I could perish into the unknown.

“Hollin, listen to me.”

Dorian’s voice is a thunder clap, demanding and assertive, and very, very far away.

“I said _stop_.”

Shadows and ice and fire combined.

They all come back to me, as if summoned, the moment my brother speaks.

I take another breath, relief flooding through my veins as my power settles into me, and finally dims. I wobble on my feet, trembling, and right myself against the wall. When I look down, attempting to focus my gaze, I see my hands dark as night, black as ink, through the blur of my eyes.

I lost control again.

“It’s alright,” Dorian murmurs as he stands beside me. “It’s alright.”

But it is not alright.

“I cannot do it,” I breathe, heaving. “I cannot do it, Dorian.”

My forehead touches the cold stone, as I attempt to cool myself down. I can barely feel my feet.

But my brother keeps saying, “Hollin, it’s alright.”

And I know that he is lying.

“No,” I manage to say. “No, it’s not.”

I manage to clutch my shirt covered with sweat and pull it off me in one movement. I turn, and sit against the wall, my head spinning. I believe I might be burning more than the sun itself.

My brother sits beside me.

I feel his steady gaze. But when I look at him from the corner of my eye, I see it all. His eyes are wide and frightened.

I managed to scare the man who faced a Valg king on his own.

This training room feels awfully small. Constricting.

Or maybe it is I who is panicking senselessly.

“It’s not always going to feel like this,” Dorian tells me, bringing his knees up. “After only two days, you can’t expect to have complete control over the amount of power that you have. It’s going to take time, Hollin. Time and patience.”

I had _one_ of those things.

Certainly not _patience_.

I am silent for a long while, my eyes closed as I attempt to rid myself of the shadows at the tip of my fingers. They slowly vanish into thin air, and my breathing levels, and my blood flows freely through me. My heart settles.

_I am not dead, I am not dead, I am not dead._

“Why,” I find myself saying. “Why am I like this? Why, of all people, did I end up with this amount of power? Why me?”

I think I may have reached a breaking point.

My brother pauses, and then says, his tone sympathetic and making me sick to my stomach: “I’m afraid I can’t give you an answer for that. I wish I could give you a proper explanation, Hollin, but people like you and me have no explanation. We are descended from those who gave us these powers. Whether we like it or not, we have to live with them. We have to carry that power through the rest of our lives.”

“Our _very_ long, immortal lives,” I add drily.

Dorian smiles slightly. “You’ll get used to it, eventually.”

“I haven’t even gotten used to you looking my age,” I say. “Not having my brother age a day is, as you can probably imagine, a little bit unsettling. Can’t expect me to revel in the thought of never looking past the age of twenty.”

“Some people would give up their very soul to live forever,” Dorian mumbles.

“Not I.”

My brother looks at again. “When you have a reason to live a thousand years, someone beside to share those centuries with you…it does not seem like a curse at all.”

He gets this love-struck, puppy-eyed look, and I almost barf. “I get it, you love the witch.”

Dorian elbows me playfully. “I think you might like her a bit, too.”

I huff. “Me, enjoying the witch’s company…” I shake my head. “You’re more delusional than I thought.”

Dorian chuckles softly, and we sit in silence.

I say, “What if I wanted a simple life? Human and ordinary?” I look up at the ceiling, as if I could see my father’s face there – not the human man, but the Valg that wore his face – looking down at me. “What if I wanted to be nothing but normal?”

My brother is silent, and I know that he has no answer for me, no comforting words.

“You can do two things,” he says at last. “You can run from your future, or-”

“Don’t give me that _accept your fate_ talk. That is fucking bullshit.”

Dorian rests his head against the wall. “You didn’t let me finish. You can run from your future, or you can face it fully and work with what you got. You know you cannot have those powers stripped from you. You and what you can do are not two different things, Hollin. It is part of you, as it is part of me. You might hate it, but it is what you make of it that makes the difference in how you see not only the world, but how you see yourself.”

I pause.

Then I look at him. “You said exactly what I expected you to say. A bunch of crap.”

Unexpectedly, my brother scoffs a laugh. “It is what it is, brother. The world is strange, and we must live in that strangeness.”

“What’s the point?” I wonder out loud. “What’s the point of anything, really? We’ve been at this for a week-“

“It’s been two days, Hollin.”

“-and today I almost fucking killed myself. Why keep doing any of this? Why even try?”

Dorian gives me a smile. “Simple: so you can be with the woman you love. And propose to her without those fears.”

A cold river runs through my veins, freezing me from the inside out. I stop in that moment, staring at him. “How did you…”

My brother scoffs once more. “Do you think I was born yesterday? As if your intentions were not perfectly clear since you were fourteen years old and already absolutely in love with Evangeline.” He pauses, and gives me a smirk. “Also, I saw the ring in your pocket yesterday.”

I shake my head at him, not knowing how to excuse myself. So I settle for the truth, for once. “I wasn’t planning on proposing. I mean, I was. Of course, not now.”

“Too soon?” Dorian asks.

I pause, unwilling to show him this part of myself. But then I force the words out of my mouth. I tell him, “I was only going to propose once I knew for certain that I was what she wanted. And…once I got a hold of myself. Of what I can do. When I was absolutely positive that I was not going to hurt her, that I got my powers handled…that’s when I was going to do it.”

My brother looks at me, sighing softly. “Do you think she will say yes?”

My worst fear. My best doubt. “I don’t know.”

Dorian pats my shoulder. “I knew it, you know. I knew it when you sent that letter inviting Nitzia to the ball that you were not suggesting a proposal.”

“You thought I couldn’t do it?”

“I thought you wanted nothing less than that,” Dorian clarifies. “And I was right. You simply invited the Princess of Eyllwe to come, didn’t you?”

I lower my head. “Yes.”

“You knew, deep down, that you weren’t made to be with anyone else but Evangeline. So even if she did not want you, you would not be able to give yourself to someone else.”

I pause, watching him. “Done with your little detective moment?”

Dorian chuckles, lifting himself up – and helping me along. “I am happy for you, brother. I do sincerely hope that when you feel it is time to ask the question, that she says yes.”

I watch him leave, sighing to myself. “So do I.”

***

I miss her terribly.

As I look out at the snowy gardens up in the tower, I find myself thinking of her, all my work left forgotten on my desk.

I imagine her sitting on that chair next to me, wrapped in her woollen coat that she knit herself. It was always too big on her shoulders, and she always had to fold her sleeves three or four times. Every night, after every lesson, she would forget all about it and there it would hang, that woollen coat, sitting on her chair, keeping me company.

I imagine it all now. So perfectly. That woollen coat and her hair pinned at the back of her hair, strands falling over her face as she reads a dust-filled book. I imagine myself finding her there, her smile as she looks up at me, as I lean down to taste her lips.

_“My dearest,” _I would say._ “I missed you.”_

And I truly do.

That ring sits on the side of my desk on top of multiple books. It glints in the afternoon light. I had it made a week after she left for Caraverre, and two weeks later, it still sits there, staring at me.

I sigh, touching the thin band.

I could never deserve her. Not in a million years.

I do not even know if she would agree to have a bond between us – binding her life to mine. Would she want that? Or would she feel as if I’d chained her to me?

I leave the ring alone, putting it back down. I watch the snow fall. I think of her.

I wonder if she thinks of me.

And, as night approaches, as I move to the telescope to say hello to the stars, I wonder if it is my face she sees at night – if she looks up at the night sky and have my name stranded on her lips.

What a wonderful thing to think the one that owns your heart would always be under the same sky as you, no matter how far you were apart.

As I stand there, watching stars intertwine, I find something particularly curious in the universe. It makes me smile.

It gives me an idea.

No, I could never deserve her.

But I have to try.

I have to try.

***

A month and three weeks.

I have a heart full of longing and a stomach full of nerves. The letters she has sent me sit on my pocket, hidden from the world. Her tender words, her encouragements, her little stories about her day, about Lysandra and Aedion, about Caraverre…they all keep me grounded.

I know I will not hurt her.

I know it.

Trusting myself is one step closer to trusting my powers. I know that now. So I take a breath, another, and another, until those shadows are gone. Until I can only see myself, and not the monster everyone in this palace thinks I am.

On a particularly grey morning, I arrange a coach and find myself having to deal with the brat that is my niece.

“Where are you going?” She stomps her foot in the snow, raising her eyebrows. “TELL ME.”

Her father is extremely amused.

I, however, am not.

“That is not any of your business,” I lean against the door of the coach, waiting for my luggage to come. 

Rhiannon crosses her arms. “You’re going to go to Evangeline, aren’t you?”

I sigh, rolling my eyes. To my brother, I say: “You’re going to have another one of _that_?” I point at her.

Before my brother can reply, Rhiannon leaves a very well landed punch on my arm. “Don’t be _rude_.”

“Don’t you need to go file your teeth?”

“Don’t you need go have a bath?” She scrunches her nose. “You smell.”

I scoff. “Original.”

She raises her nose in the air, making a face at me. “Ooh, look at you, arguing with a ten-year-old. Feeling smart?”

Dorian bursts out laughing.

“Don’t encourage her,” I spit.

Dorian says, “Wait ‘til you have one of your own.”

It is I that makes a face then.

“Since you’re going to Evangeline and _not taking me with you_,” she puts an angry emphasis on that last part, “please deliver this note. And _don’t_ read it. I will bite your hand off.”

I take the note and shuffle it impatiently in my pocket. “Fine, now go. My luggage is here and I am off.”

I get myself onto the coach. When I close the door, my brother leans in. “Do you have it?”

I sigh, shaking my head. “Dorian, gods, try not to look so fucking excited.”

He frowns. “Can’t I be happy for you?”

“I am not proposing,” I mouth the words.

“So why are you taking it with you?” He says back, smirking.

I have no answer.

And then he says, a little more serious: “Everything is going to be fine, Hollin. I truly believe it. I am proud of you.”

I roll my eyes. “Alright.”

I turn my face away so he doesn’t see the emotion in my eyes, and how much those words actually mean to me.

I believe my brother knows, for he smiles wider.

When he backs away, Rhiannon leans into the window.

She rests her chin on her hands, staring at me. She says, “Do not read the letter.”

“You said that already.”

“I know.” She narrows her eyes. “Do not read. Do _not_.”

“Fine!” I tell her impatiently.

Then my niece leans in and says, “Tell Evangeline I miss her.”

“I will do no such thing.”

Rhiannon smirks, used to this little banter between us. She says, “Don’t miss me too much.”

I sneer. “I won’t, witch.”

Her smile softens, and once again, I see my brother so clearly in her golden gaze. She climbs the wheels of the coach, leans through the opening, and wraps her arms around my neck.

I sigh, waiting for it to be over.

I pull her close, patting her back. “Don’t get into too much trouble without me, witch.”

She smiles, pulling back. “You know I will.”

I smirk at her, and she smirks at me.

She pulls back, walking to her father, and Dorian gives me a wink.

Then, through the snow and beneath grey skies, I’m off.

***

When Adarlan is miles and miles away, I push open the small note. Rhiannon’s handwriting comes into view, scribbled, with ink smudges around the edges.

It reads:

_Dear Evangeline, _

_ I miss you a lot. Like a lot._

_ I know you are going to be back for the ball and for my birthday and everything, but I still miss our time together. I hope you are having a good time in Caraverre. _

_ So, I wanted to write you this note to say something about Hollin._

  * _And yes, I forgive you for allowing him to steal you, even though you were my friend first –_

_I hope you really like Hollin._

_Because he really likes you._

_I know some people don’t like him, but they’re stupid. _

_He’s actually a pretty cool uncle._

_He even taught me my first swear words. I know you would disapprove, but I promise I don’t swear in front of mama or papa!_

_Anyway, I just wanted to say that. I think he wants to make you smile all the time. He looks at you like my papa looks at mama. Or like a honeybee looks at a really pretty flower. _

_So consider this letter my official blessing._

_Your friend, and future queen, RHIA._

_P.S.: Hollin, you smelly stinker, I knew you would read this!!!!!!!!!!!_

I only realize it after a while.

But when I come back to myself, I realize that I am smiling.

***

Caraverre is mainly woodlands.

Beautiful and deep. The end of the afternoon gives me sunnier skies, even if the cold is frighteningly chilling my bones. I wrap my fur cloak tighter around myself, watching the puffs of breath like smoke filling the air.

At once, I see the manor.

That ring feels awfully heavy in my pocket.

I sink in my seat, filled with nerves.

I did not tell her I would come.

Maybe I should have.

Maybe surprising her is not the way to go.

Maybe she won’t like it.

Maybe-

_Maybe, maybe, maybe._

_ If, if, if._

I sigh. Breathing.

I think of her lying with me in my cot, the way her breath caught when I kissed her cheeks. I think of her smiling up at me as she touched my hair, and a soothing calm settles in my bones. Instant and immediate.

The effect this woman has on me-

“Your Highness,” the coachman announces. “We have arrived to Caraverre.”

The coach stops, the horses whining in the cold.

I exit, breathing in the air.

Caraverre manor sits amongst the woodlands, surrounded frozen lakes and bushes as big as trees. Wildflowers sit along the grass path, wilted and bare, covered with snow. To my right sits a village – considerably new, from the looks of it. Little houses of each and every colour spread across the small hills, along the ponds with white little doors and flower pots hanging from the windows. Further back from them sit the farms and fields, and more forest beyond what I can see. Cows and horses move freely along the snow, catching a bit of air before it is time to their stables.

I feel inexplicable calm.

Like I might take a breath in and not die of fear, for once.

It is strangely exciting – to be without fear.

The coachman pulls out my luggage, while I stand there, not knowing how to approach the manor.

I have never had to introduce myself anywhere. Wherever I walked, I always had people watching me without needing me to explain my presence. Here, I am intruding. Here, I am no prince.

I pause.

“Sir?”

I look over at the coach man, watching me carefully. Kindly, I would say. I might have found one person in my palace that is not afraid of me.

“Are you ready to go?”

“Yes,” I tell him, and we advance.

***

It is Aedion that receives me at the door.

He looks less than surprised.

He actually leans against the frame, chuckling.

Aedion says, “I should have known.”

I raise a brow. “Pardon?”

He crosses his arms over his chest, shaking his head to himself. “She hasn’t stopped talking about you.”

My heart is filled to brim with light at that.

So full of light.

I move the weight off one foot to the other uncomfortable. “I needed to see her.”

Aedion gives me a knowing smile. “I reckon she does not know that you are here.”

I ask him, “Do I impose a problem? If I do, I can-“

Aedion clicks his tongue, pushing the door open and giving me space to move inside. He says, “Come in, Hollin.”

And that is that.

He leads me towards the parlour. Everything from the high ceilings to the soft cotton sofas screams of home. Nothing is lavish or extravagant. It feels like a true home should – welcoming.

I find a very pregnant Lysandra on the couch, munching over cookies and tea as she reads a book. When she sees me, her eyes almost fall out of her eyes.

Her husband laughs again.

She straightens on the couch, watching me carefully. And then, before saying her hellos, she turns to her husband, clearly annoyed: “Fine,” she says, waving a hand. “You win.”

“I told you he’d show,” Aedion grins.

“I think I might be in the middle of something here,” I say dumbly. “I can come back another time.”

“Nonsense,” Lysandra says to me, lifting herself up with one hand on her belly, and kissing me on both cheeks. “We are happy to welcome you.”

The embarrassment is clear on my cheeks.

I’d never been kind to these people. At events, whenever anyone visited, I insisted on turning my face away and refusing to allow myself to care, afraid they would see the truth of what I was. Now that they know…well.

I no longer have anything to hide.

For a moment, watching their home, watching Aedion pull his wife into a gentle kiss, I find myself wishing that I had made an effort. That I had tried harder to smile and to listen and to allow them all to truly welcome me into the family.

Instead, I’d missed out on everything.

“Hollin?” Lysandra says.

“Yes,” I stagger. “Apologies. What were you saying?”

Lysandra smiles kindly. “Stay as long as you like. I can show you to your room.”

The coachman next to me helps with the trunk, and, at my agreement, the four of us walk up the stairs and down an open corridor. Everything feels warm here. 

I have never seen the home where Evangeline spent most of her time when she wasn’t under Darrow’s tutelage. Seeing this part of her life makes my heart feel warm.

In my assigned room, Lysandra says to me, “She is the garden.”

Like she knows it is the only thing I wish to know.

I stand there. “I…does she really speak about me?”

She smiles, her eyes gleaming. “Everyday.”

My face does a weird thing. I think I can’t control my smile.

Lysandra touches my shoulder, and then they all leave me alone to contemplate the room.

It is then I notice that no shadows come to me.

No darkness in sight.

***

I do find her in the gardens.

She chats away to an old lady – a gardener, perhaps, or simply a servant -, chopping potatoes into an old wooden bucket. I see the way her hair falls over her back and, after a month and a half of only seeing her handwriting, seeing her smile and hearing her voice is like drinking a gallon of water after being thirsty for years.

I stand there for a moment, contemplating the scene, not wishing to interrupt.

She laughs at something the woman says, and her profile comes into view. I hear her say, “I do agree. Though give me one sweet potato pie and I will devour it completely on my own.”

I smile at that, and I guess a breathy sound escapes my lips. It makes her turn.

She gasps, and the bucket falls to the snow. 

I clench my fists then – a bad habit when I’m nervous.

I tried to imagine what her reaction would be like. If she would run to my arms, if she would furrow her brow and ask why I was there in the first place.

Evangeline does neither of those things. She stands suddenly, dropping her knife too, watching me as if she cannot believe I am real.

Her nose and cheeks are pink from the cold.

I always wondered why she loved nature so much – that she would prefer to sit in the cold just to breathe the air instead of being inside in front of a fireplace. Being here, in Caraverre, with the forest right beside it, I realize why.

“You’re here,” she says.

She approaches me slowly, blinking.

Her fur coat is long, dragging over the snow. Her gloved hands reach out, and suddenly she is touching my cheek, and I am feeling her so close to me, and everything is bright and beautiful.

I smile, almost wildly, wrapping my arms around her smaller frame.

“Hello,” I tell her.

She smiles then, too – and I know the sun does not carry the brightness that her smile does.

It could _never_.

We hear a cough and look up, seeing the old lady from before standing near close, a knowing smile on her face. I almost move away completely, but before I can Evangeline wraps a hand around my arm and the sound of her laughter stops my brain from making further decisions.

“This is our governess, Mrs. Raven,” she says to me. “Mrs. Raven, this is Hollin.”

I bow my head, and the woman fixes her round glasses, smiling kindly. It is the first time someone does not bow at me, and, surprisingly, I find myself liking it.

Mrs. Raven smiles upon me as a grandmother would smile at her grandson.

She says, “Ah, yes, yes. Very good to meet you, my boy.”

I nod curtly. “Likewise.”

She laughs softly. “So prince-like, he is.” Then she extends a hand in my direction.

I start, hesitating.

The matter is simple – I do not like having people touch me.

Even my mother’s own touch had once made me flinch inexplicably, so I cannot imagine something worse than a stranger reaching out to touch me. I may have found my exception in Evangeline, but that childish fear makes me very still as I stare at the woman.

And yet.

I have never felt as calm as this one stranger looks over at me, and a little voice in the back of mind tells me that this old lady is no ordinary woman.

I know a little bit about the unusual and abnormal.

So, I give her my hand.

The woman pauses, turning my palm to the skies. She searches the lines, her thumb passing over the skin. Unsurprisingly, I find myself jolting, but the woman has a rather strong grip. Her face remains unchangeable.

“A man of words,” she murmurs, her voice as soothing as a lonely cricket singing in the night. “A man of science. So much ink that these hands have absorbed.”

I look over at Evangeline, and she gives me a knowing smile.

“A fascinating mind, too.”

I start.

The woman looks over at Evangeline, who I feel blush bright crimson next to me. I am so tempted to look her over and kiss those cheeks. “And what pretty eyes he has!”

Evangeline looks up, and indeed – those cheeks are tinted pink. “He does,” she murmurs.

The woman looks at me and drops my hand. “You have a very strong soul, my boy. Very strong, indeed.” Then she looks at Evangeline and, to my surprise, _winks_ at her. “He is a keeper, my dear.”

Then she is off, a bucket on each hand, whistling to herself.

“She is a bit odd,” I confess.

Evangeline laughs quietly. “She is the loveliest, though.”

Then we both stare at each other.

Evangeline’s smile softens, and my heart feels as if it is going to burst out of my chest. “You really are here,” she says after a while.

I tell her, “I needed to come see you desperately.”

“Desperately, uh?” She smiles so wide that her eyes crinkle at the edges.

“I…” I pause, breathing a small, awkward laugh, because I cannot seem to find the words. Everything I rehearsed in my head during my journey now feels superfluous. Somehow, nothing I wish to say seems like it is enough. Panicking slightly, I take hold of her hand. “Are you really happy that I’m here? I mean – did I make the right call? Or did I cross the line? I-“

My words get lost somewhere on my throat as Evangeline wraps her arms underneath my cloak, and around my body. Her head rests on my chest, as she breathes in. “I am so glad you are here, Hollin.”

A sound escapes me – either a breath of pure relief or simply a sound of pleasure as Evangeline looks up with a too-real smile. I dreamt of that smile. I cherished every memory of it while she was gone.

We both stare at each other as it begins to snow, and Evangeline gently traces the line of my cloak. “You look very handsome.”

I believe it is I that who is blushing now. “Do you make it your daily goal to absolutely obliterate me?” I brush a piece of hair away from her face. “You beautiful, wild menace of a girl.”

Evangeline positively _melts_.

I am positively _delighted_.

She tugs at my cloak, and I tug her closer.

The second I bend down, my nose skimming hers, we hear from behind us, “KIDS, come inside! Dinner!”

When Evangeline and I look up, we see a very smug-looking Aedion at the entrance doors, watching with his arms crossed.

Evangeline’s lips set into a thin line as she tries to contain her laughter. She looks up at me, raising her eyebrows.

“Later,” I tell her. “Meet me later outside.”

“Why?” She asks, narrowing her eyes. “What are you planning?”

“Who says I’m planning anything?”

I touch her hand once more, walking up the stairs.

Evangeline watches me carefully, and laughs, “You are a terrible, terrible liar.”

I swing our hands and, when Aedion turns his back and disappears through the door way, I quickly pull her close, and touch my lips to hers.

She tastes like spring.

Evangeline gasps into my mouth before her body melts into mine. She touches my cheeks, laughing slightly against my lips, that sound echoing through the gardens as she kisses me back.

I could do this forever, and ever, and ever.

And ever.

And ever.

And ever.

***

We do not go outside.

Instead, after dinner we sit in the parlour with hot tea, and I mainly watch the way Evangeline interacts with her family.

She sings a song with Aedion, her skilled fingers moving over the piano keys as easily as a bird takes flight. Aedion changes the lyrics every now and then, and Evangeline laughs over the piano, missing a note or two in her distraction. Lysandra combs through her golden hair, smiling as Evangeline looks up at her. 

It makes me happy – seeing her happy. 

It soothes my heart that, after those years when the war was over, Evangeline still had this. After so much loss, after so much pain-

She has not once spoken about her mother, and the visit that she paid Evangeline that day in Adarlan.

I do not push.

I know how difficult it must be to remember the things we tried to forget all our lives. I tell myself that if and when Evangeline wishes to share that part of her life with me, she will. Until then, I wait.

This is what she taught me.

Sometimes we do not need someone to talk our emotions out of us. Sometimes we just need someone there. Sometimes, silence is our healer. I just hope that she knows that I am here for her.

I hope she knows.

Lysandra and Aedion retire to their bedroom, and Evangeline and I find ourselves leaning against the open window of the parlour, feeling the cold winter hair in our cheeks. She pulls her woollen coat more tightly over her shoulders, her eyes bright in the moonlight.

Her shoulder touches mine. “What did you wish to show me?” She asks gently.

I smile, looking up at the sky. “I wanted to show you the stars.”

Evangeline looks up, her smile widening, her gaze filled with wonder. “It has been a while since we’ve done this.”

Indeed.

I tell her, “Once, I read that the small portion of the universe we have access to contains an unthinkable number of stars that are invisible to our eyes. Think of all the stars you see tonight. Multiply that by three trillion, and you would not be able to reach the maximum count of all the stars that already exist.”

Evangeline blinks slowly, sighing quietly to herself. “I can barely imagine that big of a number.” A pause. “One night you said that new stars are born everyday, and that some perish every minute. How can you tell – that one star is brand new?”

I turn my face to her. “Well, quite simple, really. I determine the age of a star by its mass and light.”

“So you simply observe it.”

“Yes, you can say that. I also take notes of its motion, how it navigates the universe, how it behaves. No two stars are the same, you see. Everything you see in this sky, tonight, is simultaneously older than this very world, and younger than that rose sprouting from the earth.”

Evangeline leans against my shoulder. “I would like to see it close someday. If it were possible.”

I stare at her, the way her fringe sways with the wind, the way her eyes adjust to the light, turning darker as the moon is hidden by a cloud. I tell her, “Evangeline.”

She looks at me.

I say, “Look up. There,” and point.

She does. “What am I looking at?”

I smile to myself, touch two fingers to her chin, and turn her face slightly to my left. “A cluster of stars. They form a cross. Do you see?”

Evangeline squints her eyes. “No,” and shakes her head.

“Look carefully,” I say.

I touch her hand, letting our fingers intertwine, before extending her indicator and pointing to the sky. Slowly, I trace that shape, and she gasps. “OH! Yes, yes! I see it!”

“Do you see the one in the middle?”

“It shines so bright,” she says, eyes wide in admiration. “It is so huge in comparison.”

“That is a newborn star,” I tell her.

She pauses. “Is it?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Do you remember when I told you that scholars named their stars? The new ones they discovered?”

“Who discovered it?” She asks.

I smile. “I did.” I touch her chin again, turning her to me. “Can you guess its name?”

Evangeline’s gaze softens, her eyes turning into molten gold as she searches my face. Slowly, she shakes her head.

“Evangeline,” I murmur, leaning down. I touch my lips to her cheek, entranced by her. “Evangeline,” I say, as my lips drag to the tip of her nose, following the path to her other cheek, then down to her jaw. “Evangeline.”

“It’s yours,” she breathes, eyes closed. “And you named it after me.”

I touch her cheek, watching her. “The one who shines the brightest. The only one I see.”

She smiles, “Hollin…”

“Wherever I am, and wherever you are, you will always have a piece of me in the skies.” I cannot help myself, and pull her closer, until she is pressed against me, her warmth seeping into me. “Know it is you I see. Know that it is you, always.”

Evangeline watches me, her eyes searching mine, her lips parted. “What are you saying?”

In find myself not at all afraid as I murmur, “I think you know.”

Evangeline closes the space between us, pressing a kiss to my chin. “I think…I think you have known for a while that I…well, I…” She staggers, and pauses, and breathes a laugh. “I cannot speak all of a sudden, it seems.”

I smile at her, my chest filled with warmth, as I trace her cheek. “Tell me.”

But she does not. Instead, Evangeline wraps her arms around my shoulders, gets on the tip of her toes, and touches her lips to mine in a gentle, sweet press.

I breathe against her, dying to pull her closer and closer, until there is nothing separating me from her.

Evangeline lets out a sound deep within her throat that awakes something deep inside me, and as I lose myself in her and she loses herself in me, I begin to think that we are nothing but two lone stars in this vast universe, always bound to be held in each other’s gravities.

***

I leave her at the door of her room, in the same corridor as my own.

She takes my hand, and kisses my palm. I return the gesture, giddy with happiness.

Evangeline tells me, “Good night, Hollin.”

The words are bursting out of my mouth, bubbling inside my chest, but I keep them in. For now.

I say, “Good night, Evangeline.”

She touches my cheek, smiles in that gentle way of hers, and makes her way inside. She holds the door open for a few seconds, watching me, as I watch her, sighing softly, as I do, and smiles. Even as she closes the door.

***

It’s strange.

I feel oddly different.

The fire crackles and spits in the hearth as I lean against the mantel. I watch my hands.

I will the shadows to appear, and they do – subdued, soft, drifting over form the tips of my fingers to the door. Not like they have a mind of their own but- 

As if they are an extension of me.

_How?_

_You and what you can do are not two different things, Hollin. It is part of you._

Part of me. Not something living, planning to wrap its hands around my throat but-

Part of me.

I am king of my own realm. I do not bow.

The shadows move as if in answer, no longer my enemies.

I watch in wonder, as I retract the shadows, then let them go. And they follow my will like clouds follow gusts of wind.

I am afraid how much I am not afraid anymore.

I am too distracted to hear the soft knock at my door. Too lost in myself and my own thoughts to see the body that peaks over the door.

Until she sees me, and I see her.

I harness that energy, and pull it back to myself on instinct. The shadows fade, slowly, until they disappear into thin air.

Evangeline walks into the room, the candlelight warming up her skin. She wears her nightshift, her hair loose, falling over her shoulders. Her feet bare.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she smiles, hands behind her back.

I contemplate her. “You’re here.”

She points at my hands with her chin, murmuring, “That was beautiful.”

I think I might kneel at her feet.

“What?” I ask, even though I know.

“The shadows,” she says, approaching me. “I see training with your brother has been doing you good.”

“I think you have been doing me good,” I tell her. And then I see how that sentence could be interpreted, and almost choke on my own spit. “That came out wrong, I-“

Evangeline laughs softly. “I was impatient to see you again.”

I pause, keeping my hands to myself, firmly clasped behind my back. “It is an awfully good night to take a stroll to…my chambers.”

“Although rather cold, I would say.”

“Yes. Yes, rather cold.”

Evangeline pauses, looking down at her feet, her mouth opening and closing. We are both at a loss for words.

And then she take a step, and another, until she is standing in front of me, her eyes big and-

And wanting.

I see so many things in her eyes I am frightened to consider.

She says nothing as she touches my cheek. I lean into her warmth, unable to keep my eyes opened. They fall closed as her thumb caresses my skin. I realize I need to shave. I realize I might beg her to kiss me, and not feel any shame in it.

Evangeline parts her lips, and whispers, “Hollin.”

“Yes.”

“Can I…” She pauses, swallowing. “May I…?”

I do not know what she is asking until I feel her hands at my chest, skimming the buttons of my loose shirt. I watch her, my fuzzy brain not exactly getting her question. I only realize what she wants when her fingers tentatively open a button of my shirt, and then I am too entranced to say anything, that I simply watch her eyes as she watches mine, as her hands keep at their slow work. One by one. Her breathing quickens as her hands gently untuck my shirt from my trousers.

She pauses, not knowing what to do next.

I am all too intrigued.

All to mesmerized.

Evangeline looks down at the plains of my chest, so close I can feel her breath at my bare collarbones. She splays her hand inside my shirt, and her touch is warm, and comforting, and it startles me how much it ruins my composure.

She looks up, and I sense her nervousness and apprehension, and they match my own.

Suddenly I’m laughing under my breath, touching my forehead to hers, taking her hand in mine and kissing her knuckles. Unable to keep myself from doting on her adorableness.

Evangeline looks up, startled, blushing to the ends of her hair. “What?”

I find myself near hysterical. Gently, I kiss her face, and say, “And what, may I ask, are _you_ doing?”

I plan to tease her, and I am all too pleased to see her stammer and trip over her own words. “I…” she tries, scratching the back of her neck. “Nothing.”

I smile. “Do tell, my dearest.”

She gives me a look. “You’ve never called me _dearest_ before.”

“You’ve never torn my shirt open before.”

Evangeline’s cheeks could not be more red. “I…” then she settles herself, and murmurs, “Have you ever…?”

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“You know what I mean,” she laughs, swatting at my hand. “Do not tease me so!”

I shrug. “Have _you_?”

“I asked you first.”

I touch her cheek. “Does it matter?”

She shrugs too, then. “No, of course not. I’m…curious.”

I watch her. “No,” I sincerely say. “I never have.”

“Oh.” Evangeline says. “I…alright.”

I smile. “Did you expect otherwise?”

“Not really,” she says, pursing her lips. “I honestly didn’t expect any answer in particular. I also…I never.”

I breathe a soft laugh, touching my lips to her forehead. “As if this little exhibition of yours was not an indication…”

She huffs a laugh, shaking her head. “Why. Are you. So. Mean.”

I brush my lips against hers. “That was adorable,” I chuckle, and she laughs back, rolling her eyes at me. I pull her in for one more kiss, and Evangeline places both feet on top of mine, wrapping her arms around my shoulders.

The sweetest kisses are her to give and mine to receive. Only mine.

I do not think she knows how affectionate she is – how she has the gentlest of touches, how much love can be felt everytime she looks at me.

I make sure she knows.

Both my arms wrap around her frame, pulling her up, off my feet, her own dangling in the air, before I place her down.

She chuckles, pulling back to look at me. Her gaze softens, her hands tracing my jawline. Evangeline murmurs, “May I stay?”

I let out a breath, burying my face on her neck. “You are tempting me.”

She grins as I pull back, clearly proud of herself with the mess she’s made of me. “There’s nothing wrong with tempting you.”

I hold her hand, kiss the palm. “There is something very wrong about me being tempted in _this_ house.” I give her a knowing look.

Evangeline laughs quietly. “Sleep then.”

“Sleep,” I tell her. “For now.”

Something in her gaze changes, and I am all too tempted to explore what that means, but then I get a hold of myself.

Evangeline moves to the bed first, slipping underneath the covers.

She watches me as I remove my shirt, and something about her gaze sets me ablaze. I remind myself to keep that energy quiet and on a tight leash, even if it feels as if it might explode out of me.

I slip into bed, and Evangeline holds on to my side as I pull the blankets over both of us. Her head rests on my chest, and I marvel at the gentle peace in my heart and in my mind, at feeling her this close.

Suddenly, she asks, “Any particular reason why you’ve never taken someone to your bed?” She lifts her face to look at me, resting on my shoulder. “It’s just that…I heard that a lot. That you turned girls down.”

I sigh softly, trying to find the words to properly explain. “I have a difficult time…with touch.”

She blinks, giving me the time to expand on that.

Slowly, I do. “I always had. I despised hugs, kisses. It made bile rise to my throat.”

“You never flinch when I touch you.”

I look down at her, unafraid to say, “That is because I want you.” When her gaze brightens, the flush rising to her cheeks, I smile, and add: “And trust you. I never trusted anyone in my life.”

“Not even Dorian?”

I pause. “I love my brother. But it took a long time for me to see him as such.”

Evangeline does not speak for a long time, and as the candles dim, I think she might have fallen asleep. Then, she murmurs: “When I was a child and my mother first…s-sold me,” she forces the word out, and cringes, “Lysandra never allowed anyone close to me. Not even the women. It was a horrid place. At the time, I didn’t really understand what was going on. Lysandra always hid it from me, you see. The only memory I have that made me understand, years later, exactly what that woman sold me into, was of a night in spring. A man had approached me. He was older, much older. I thought him to be friendly.” She seems to shrink as she holds me, her voice getting slower, quieter, as the story progresses. “The moment Lysandra saw what was happening, she shifted for the first time in front of me. She cracked that man’s spine.”

I watch her face, and gently pull small hairs away.

Evangeline continues, “I still hear the sound. But – and maybe this will sound horrid – I remember that the sound did not bother me quite as much as his voice did. Lysandra had shifted back, and…then I knew. And I was no longer afraid.”

“Were you not afraid of what Lysandra was? Of what she could do?”

“No,” Evangeline says. “She did what she did to protect me. All of it. And it did not scare me that she shifted into a snow leopard right in front of my eyes. It fascinated me.”

I smile slightly, watching her face brighten.

“I wanted to be like her,” Evangeline says. “It is because of Lysandra that…the trauma, and the pain, ends there. That there was never…” she does not continue, and she does not need to.

I hold her hand to my chest. “I am sorry.”

She looks up at me.

I feel my brow furrowing. “I am sorry about what I said that day. I had to right to imply…to bring that memory back.”

“Hollin,” she says to me in the near-darkness. “You have apologized for it. Countless times. You’ve made up for it, too.”

“I do not believe it is enough.”

“This,” she says, “the trust we built, the…the friendship we build…is all that matters now.” She touches my cheek. “I could never find anyone else like you in all of the world, in all of the universe. I…”

She stops herself, biting her lip, and I feel the words as she gazes at me, going straight to my heart and staying there, for years to come.

She is afraid to say them, so I complete it for her. “I love you.”

Evangeline goes very still.

I say it again, near her cheek. “I love you.”

And as the words fall out of my mouth, I cannot, for the life of me, imagine ever saying anything else but that.

Evangeline brushes her mouth against mine. “I love you,” she says, and it hits me all of a sudden – the way her mouth curves into a smile, the way she kisses me, the way she tangles herself around me and my being, that there would never be a greater happiness than this, a greater love to fill my heart, a more powerful feeling than having the woman I love in my arms telling me she loves me.

It is that feeling – more overwhelming than knowing all the secrets of the universe, that unravels the words that fall out of my mouth next, whispered against her lips, half in amazement, half in desperation, unbidden and completely sudden: “Evangeline – will you marry me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a/n: *laughing evilly* do tell me my loves, have you missed my cliffhangers? ;)


	4. Chapter 4

I think I hear him wrong.

But then Hollin pulls back, just slightly, eyes tracing every inch and corner of my face.

“What?” I ask him, half in amazement, half in a _did I imagine the words, did I make them up in my head, did my heart just explode leaving me in a complete daze _sort of state.

Hollin parts his lips, and he looks away. Shame – there is shame coating his face now, bright red and all too clear.

He says, “Forget it.”

Attempting to let me go, Hollin moves further away from me. I touch his face, keeping him there. I see the contours of his own jawline in the dark, the perfection of his nose, the arch of his brows and the dark blue eyes that now have more shadows than I ever thought possible.

I find myself smiling. “You asked me to marry you? Was that it?”

He closes his eyes, biting his cheek. “It was too soon, I shouldn’t have-”

He stops himself, and I smile wider, feeling my chest expand with every stammered word of his. “What?” I ask him, grinning from ear to ear, unable to stop myself.

Hollin appears to be horrified at himself.

He does not wish to answer, and instead looks away, his chest facing the ceiling – away from me.

On impulse, I move on top of him, one hand stopping at his chest. I hover above, leaning in to watch him up close. A bubble of laughter fills my chest at his face, the way his eyes widen as big as saucers the moment he looks up at me.

“What did you say, Hollin Havilliard?” I ask him, leaving a kiss at the corner of his mouth.

If he is bothered by our current position, Hollin certainly does not show it. What he does show, however, is an impeccable restraint in not touching me. Even if his eyes devour the shape of my shoulders and my neck, accompanying the rising heat moving up my cheeks. He blinks, swallows, and murmurs, “You think it is foolish.”

“I never said that.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“I am laughing _with_ you,” I tell him, touching his cheek, “because you just blurted out that you wanted to marry me-“

“Is that so odd?” He asks me.

“Coming from you?” I ask him right back. “Slightly.”

Hollin sits, holding a hand to the small of my back so I do not fall backwards. I am instantly too aware of how close I am, how his breath touches my upper lip, and the warmth of his bare chest against my own.

“Do you mean it?” My voice lowers slightly, my eyes serious. “Do you really mean it?”

“I _want_ it,” he says. “I want to live it all with you. But this was supposed to be…different. I’d thought it all out – how I’d ask you. I’d take you to the-“

“Hollin, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does. I ruined it.”

“You ruined nothing,” I chuckle, touching his cheeks, levelling his face to mine. “Look at me, will you? I did not say no.”

He looks at me. “I crossed a line.”

“You simply startled me a bit, that is all,” I touch my nose to his. “I have never been proposed to before, and…it’s _you_, you of all people. It’s…given me quite the heart attack.”

His eyes search mine. “I cannot tell if that is a good thing or-“

“It _is_ a good thing,” I tell him, letting him see for himself the sincerity in my eyes, in my words. “I’m…honoured that you would ask me.”

Hollin looks terribly sad, terribly broken. I realize how my words sound to him, how he believes I am rejecting him…

While I could never.

“Hollin,” I whisper to him, leaving a gentle kiss on his lips, “of course I will say yes to you.”

He goes very still.

I push the hair on his forehead back, allowing his eyes to shine up at me in the gentle moonlight. My hand moves to his face, my thumb tracing the sculpted lines. “I do want to marry you.”

He watches me carefully, that mind of his working three, four, five steps ahead. He murmurs, “Then why does it sound as if you’d rather do everything else but that?”

I shake my head at him, smiling softly. “Hollin, I do want to marry you,” I repeat, “but my question is…do _you_?”

He starts. “What?”

I touch my forehead to his. “As much as I believe in your heart, and in your words, and in your love for me, I need to ask: why so suddenly?”

He does not respond, his mouth open half-way.

I let my lips brush his once more before I tell him, “There is no rush, Hollin. No rush at all. What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing,” he breathes, yet he clings tighter to me.

And I have my answer.

“You are afraid to lose me,” I murmur to him. “That is why you are rushing this. My love, I am not going anywhere.” I take his hand, and lead it to my heart. “Hollin, I am not leaving. I am not going to look at you differently tomorrow, or the day after the next, or ever. I will wake up every morning, shadows or no shadows, and see the man I fell in love with. The man I am saying yes to.” He lowers his head, but I take his chin, and gently lift his eyes to mine. “Do not make a decision based on fear, especially a fear that is not real. I am yours, already. Nothing will take me away from you.”

Hollin sighs, puling me closer, burying his face in shoulder. My arms go up and around him, pulling him to me. “Why can you read me like an open book?” He mumbles in distress.

I laugh quietly against his ear. “Because you are _my_ open book.”

He looks up, sniffing slightly. “I _do_ want it, you know. I want you, forever.”

“I know,” I whisper, running my thumb over his bottom lip. “I know. You and I have been through a lot. Let us get used to each other. To…this. Know it is still a yes – and it will always be a yes.”

“Don’t pretend you’re doing this for both of us,” he tells me, those perceptive eyes looking into mine. “I know you are doing this for me. Because _I_ have things to work through.”

“So what if you do?” I say. “We can get through them together. And we will.”

“I shouldn’t ask you that. You shouldn’t _need_ to do that.”

“You’re not,” I tell him, shaking my head. “_I_ am. You need to stop thinking of yourself as an inconvenience, Hollin. People who love each other are there for each other, period. I _want_ to be here. I want _you_. Do you believe me?”

The hand at my chest clings tighter to my fingers as he sighs. “Evangeline, I…”

I kiss him then, mostly to stop him from saying something that will surely end up leaving another wound in his own heart, but also because I find myself all too distracted – and tempted – by the way his mouth moves.

Hollin allows me to fall back into the mattress and he follows, never breaking the kiss, crawling above me. And though there are still many, many things to discuss, many words hovering above us, and many things to think about, my mind slips into a blissful haze as Hollin tilts my chin, lips brushing over the underside of my jaw, before dropping lower.

I am trembling, and not with fear.

He says against my skin, “I love you, most desperately.”

I watch him from below him, the tension sizzling in the air between us. Hollin’s nose skims the skin of my throat, down, down, his lips dragging over me, until he reaches my collarbones, and the hem top of my nightshift. There is a pause, and I watch his lips brush against the seam.

He looks up, dark eyes rimmed with long, dark lashes.

I think I am not breathing.

I do not feel the furs or the mattress underneath me. I feel as if I might float away, if I do not hold on to him tighter.

With a curious glance at my face, Hollin drops a kiss into the middle of my chest, over the nightshift.

I take an unsteady breath. “You said…”

“I know what I said.”

With that, Hollin looks up, and I am left without breath the moment I see a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. Nervous, and wobbly, but a smile nonetheless.

He nuzzles his face against mine, and murmurs, “I am so terribly afraid.”

“You’re not going to hurt me,” I tell him, because I know it – I believe it. “I do not mind the shadows.”

“What if it’s not shadows this time?” He says, and I know what he means the moment his hands turn cold. Very, very cold.

I hold his hand in my own, and lead his fingers to my lips. “Hollin,” I say, kissing each knuckle between each word, while his eyes trace mine, unrelentingly sweet and troubled and all too beautiful. “I want to know every inch and corner and side of you.”

Hollin stares at me.

“Lie back.”

Hollin simply watches me, a sort of curious apprehension in his eyes, as I touch his chest, and gently push him down to lie on the mattress. I look him over from where I kneel, and I have to smile to myself.

I had never seen him so uncomposed before. Not wrapped in tight garments and a cold frown etched upon his face. He never has a hair out of place – but here. Here, the curls fly each and every other way, falling over his face and becoming more unruly as the minutes tick by. His cheeks are flushed, his eyes bright as if he spent the night drinking spirits. I am all too captivated to look away, to pretend that he is not the most beautiful person I have ever laid eyes on.

And then another thought – the fact that slowly, yet surely, Hollin’s body relaxes under my own. That he trusts me. His hands move freely up my back, tangling in my hair, before stopping at my cheeks. What was once a nervous widening of his eyes is now a tender gaze, watching me with the same intensity as a wave about to unravel. Building, and building, and building, until it finally crashes onto the shore.

He says, “I love you,” and I might die with this beautiful ache inside my chest.

When I whisper the same, I mean it. Like I never meant anything else in my life.

I kiss his cheek, his eyelids, the side of his nose, his mouth, and everywhere I can reach. Slow. So, so slow. I save each and every strained breath he lets out in the back of my mind.

I take his hands in mine, and look down to see the burnt skin right between his thumb and forefinger. I trace it with my finger, and find myself murmuring, “I remember when this happened.”

That night.

We look at each other.

“It was you who healed them, weren’t you?” He asks, even though he does not need an answer he already has. 

Hollin takes my hands and kisses each one before saying, “My dearest Evangeline. My brightest star.”

Minutes tick by, and I am all covered in kisses and touches and breaths and soft laughs. I think my chest might burst as my heart keeps expanding, but I find myself not minding at all.

Not at all.

***

Hollin sleeps like the dead.

Which is unsettling, considering that he has probably never slept more than five hours in his life.

I pace around in his room in bare feet, pulling back the curtains to see a white morning, free of birdsong but full of blinding, beautiful snow. I see both Lysandra and Aedion outside, already awake and taking their tea in the garden. I smile down at them without their knowledge, watching as Aedion pulls his wife into his arms. They laugh as Lysandra falls backwards into his chest, and there they sit together, full of the happiness they have always deserved.

I look over my shoulder at my own other happiness.

Asleep.

I walk to him, peering over his shoulder. Even when the mattress dips with my weight, Hollin does not even stir.

He is still gloriously naked.

I can’t keep the stupid smile off my face. Can’t.

I lay down next to him, smiling at his sleeping face as my own nuzzles against his chest. Hollin begins to sigh, and then I feel a heavy arm fall around my shoulders.

I smile, “Good morning.”

The winter sun gets in his eyes and he frowns, shutting them closed once more. He groans, and it tugs at my heart, and then he says, so sleepy, so still, “Why are you dressed.”

I laugh. “I was cold.”

“Well.” I could never imagine his voice to be so rough in the morning. It does something to my mind. Hollin kisses the line of my jaw, and I welcome his weight on top of me. “Let me warm you.”

I laugh as he pesters my face with lazy kisses.

“Did you not get enough of that last night?” I tease, touching his jaw. His eyes open, beautiful and dark.

He says, “I will not get enough of you, of this, for an entire lifetime, Evangeline.”

I grow hot, all over.

It is in an instant that those words settle into my bones, digging deep into my chest until they reach my heart – their home.

An in another instant, Hollin’s hands are roaming over my body, taking with them my nightshift. Off it goes, into the floor, and I am clutching at his back, wanting and desperate, accepting all of his kisses and delivering some of my own.

My cheeks are burning, my eyes falling closed as Hollin unwraps my arms around his shoulders, his lips gentle against my own. I feel his hands spread my arms on the mattress as his hips shift.

I gasp.

The sound brings a smile to his lips, and I cannot seem to be able to focus on anything but his body against mine and the way he brings goosebumps all over my skin.

His fingers trace my arms as he moves us, and then he is pushing them up, above my face, as his hands drag, until his palms meet mine, and our fingers close around each other.

I think I might be dying.

“Sweetheart,” he says as he stops, so abruptly, watching me with quiet tenderness.

“Don’t,” I whisper, because there is no voice left in me. “Don’t stop. Please.”

He smiles, delighted by the torture he brings upon me.

Slowly, he peels himself away from me, leaving me aching and cold.

He tugs at my leg, gentling me down to his level. He brings his lips to mine. He takes a hand, dragging it from my chest down, down, until he reaches between my legs.

Fire. Seething fire.

Hollin does not stop there. The next moment I look up, I no longer see him. I blink, and my gaze travels down. The next moment, I close my eyes and yet see colours I could never have a name for. I realize, as he touches his lips to the top of my thighs, that he is toying with me.

I watch him then, my heart beating profoundly in my chest.

I touch his cheek, and beg, “Stop.”

But he does not.

Instead he gives me a meaningful look, intense and dark and powerful, licks his lips, and lowers back his head.

And I am gone.

***

The snow is piling up, the sun gone.

We spend the rest of the morning in bed, and nobody comes to bother us. I am nervous that Lysandra will wonder where I am, thinking that maybe she will got up to my rooms, and if she does she will see that I am not there and thus will conclude exactly what it is happening.

That I am very naked with a prince in his bed, who is also very naked.

But something tells me that, if they don’t already know, Lysandra and Aedion will not wish to interfere.

Still, guilt-ridden, I tell Hollin, “We should move.”

He looks at me, like that is the craziest idea he’s ever heard in his life.

“This is unbecoming,” I scold him, sitting up on the bed – and taking the fur blanket with me. “You are never this lazy.” 

He watches me with a kind of playfulness a tiger might show a worthy opponent. Hollin says, “I love it when you scold me.”

“Really?” I snort. “The last few times did not end very well.”

“Well,” he smirked. “I did love it, only on the inside. Very secretly.”

“So everytime I walked away from your office, you stood there grinning to yourself? Really?”

“Pretty much.”

I stare at him for a moment. “Hollin, we have to be humans again.”

He sighs, groans like a child, and even pouts like one.

Adorable, really. 

Hollin says, “Take a bath with me.”

“Hollin-“

He takes my hand, kisses it. Those dark eyes turn to me, pleading.

I melt. “No, you can’t keep doing this to me. Go on – I will take a bath in my own chambers.”

“Why.” He chuckles, and the sound reverberates through me.

“It’s…improper.”

“To bathe with me?” He raises a brow, and smirks. “May I remind you that you had at most four hours of sleep tonight, while those other six remaining were spent doing very improper activities. Do you wish me to list them?”

“Hollin, no-“

He holds up a finger, opens his mouth, but I put my hand over it.

He bites it.

“Go on,” he tells me. “Leave me.”

“Stop being dramatic.”

“I am not dramatic.”

“You are being dramatic right now,” I laugh at him, then turn his face to me. “If I bathe with you, I know we will not leave that bath for the remainder of the day, and we will most likely fall asleep on it. Plus, I am quite hungry. So chop chop! Move along. Surely a Prince can get dressed on his own.”

He watches me as I move off the bed, and keeps watching me as I put my nightshift back on.

Baffled with the intensity of his gaze, I say, “What?!”

He smiles slightly. “Nothing.”

“What were you thinking?” I ask, genuinely curious.

Hollin folds his arms under his head, and says, “That it is incredible that you love me. I may still wake up astonished for the next five hundred years.”

I stop.

And freeze.

We both seem to do so.

It is like the words are a needle popping that happy bubble we found ourselves in; the bubble that kept us from the rest of the world.

And the rest of the things we had yet to discuss.

For example – the fact that Hollin would live to be as old as the world, probably.

And I-

And I would not.

PART TWO COMING SOON.


	5. Chapter 5

Hollin

We stare at each other, still as winter waters.

“Evangeline.”

“We do not have to speak of it,” she murmurs, turning her face away, blonde hair covering her back, her shoulders, her terrified gaze. “Not yet.”

I rise, sitting on the bed, watching her. Bile rises in my throat as I realize the weight of my words, the uncertainty of them.

“Evangeline,” I say again. “I would never… I could never force it on you. To live as long as I will, just for the selfish need to have you with me. It would be forever your choice. A choice you do not have to make now.”

Just like marrying me.

She pauses, and I watch the contours of her back, the way she inclines her head forward, so sadly. She sighs, so softly. And then, she says, “For once, I just wish I was like you. All of you.”

Silence.

“I wish that-“ She pauses again, looking up towards the window, her profile to me. “That I was not so _human_.”

She says it like she hates it – that word.

I shake myself free of the sheets and move towards her, take her in my arms. And she allows me to. Evangeline scoots over so she’s staring at me, her body to mine, her eyes rising up to meet mine, her heartbeat as solid as my own. And I cannot fathom the proper words to tell her that I would put my life on the line seven hundred times just to see those eyes shine up at me.

“Human,” I tell her, “is the best thing you can be.”

“It is the _weakest_ thing I can be.”

I take her face, shaking my head as she looks down at her hands.

“Just once,” she murmurs. “Just once I wish it was easy. Just once I wish that I could simply… live. And be. As you are. As you all do. Lysandra, and Aedion, and Manon, and Dorian, and Rhia, and you.”

I raise her chin to me. “And why, my dearest, would you want that? Is it not enough to be you? Perfect, beautiful, sweet you? Your human heart is what I cherish the most, Evangeline. Your gentle nature, and your stubbornness, and the light in your eyes, and your soft snoring-“

“I don’t _snore_.” A ghost of a grin kisses her lips.

I touch my lips to her forehead. “We make the vow, if you wish. If it is important to you, whenever you are ready, I will bind myself to you.”

Evangeline sighs again, that grin gone. “You know it might not work. It might make you mortal.”

“I don’t care,” I tell her. “I was prepared to live my life as mortal until a few months ago.”

“What about your brother?” She says. “Your family?”

“Evangeline,” I say. “I would rather live seventy happy years, than live a thousand mediocre ones. I would rather have you and my family around for a little amount of time, than have them forever and be miserable.”

She looks at me, so thoughtfully. Then she touches my face. “We have time.”

“We have enough time,” I agree, kissing her cheeks. “We have more than enough. And when the time comes, and we decide, we will take the fate that was given to us and make the most of out it. I promise you.”

Her eyes dart over my own, my face, my mouth. She pulls me close, whispers, “I think I might want that bath after all.”

And then I take her in my arms again.

***

Lunch is uncomfortable.

I am all too aware of Aedion’s silence, Lysandra’s half-smile (that she does _not_ know how to hide), of Mrs. Raven’s strange, clever eyes sizing me up, and of Evangeline’s burning cheeks as she sits by me.

I am sweating an ocean. I have convinced myself not to look down at my feet, because I will surely find an entire pool of water on the floor.

We eat in silence, the food sticking to my throat. I am dying every second because I know that everyone knows that me and Evangeline did not sleep in separate rooms last night.

If my stiffness was not a clear indicator, then Evangeline’s scent all over me is the only proof Aedion needs. Even I feel it on me – I have never smelt of lavender before.

“Right,” Aedion finally says, putting his fork down, “let’s just get this over with, shall we?” Then he throws us both a look. “Are you two being safe?”

If you’d told me two days ago when I left Adarlan that I would be having this type of a conversation with Aedion Ashryver I would’ve thrown up my breakfast right then and there.

I am positively close to doing exactly that.

I do not need to look over at Evangeline to see her sinking in her chair in desperate – somehow adorable – shame.

“Oh, please,” Lysandra says, a giggle escaping her. “It is only natural that you would want to-“

“Lys, I think we just need to stick to the basics here,” Aedion begs, just as uncomfortable as us.

“The thing is,” Lysandra continues, “you two are perfectly able to make your own decisions, but if children are not in your plans soon, then you should be quite careful.”

_Oh gods. Oh gods._ Oh, send down a lightning bolt and just kill me right now.

“We are,” Evangeline mutters from her seat, looking down at her food.

I look down at her then, unable to stop myself. Were we?

She quickly explains: “I took a tonic.”

_Oh._

“Oh, wonderful,” Lysandra says. “Then that’s that. Good on you two.”

The light of my life sinks further into her seat, looking about as ready to perish as I am.

“Right,” Aedion says, cheerfully. “Now that that’s out of the way, we both have other things to discuss with you two.”

“Oh, give them a break,” Mrs. Raven laughs in a croaky voice. “The boy looks ready to stab himself in the eye with his fork.”

Oh GODDESS. _PLEASE._

“It’s not that,” Aedion snorts, giving his governess an amused glance. “We wanted an opinion.”

Evangeline, all too happy to change topic of conversation, pipes right in: “Oh? What about?”

“Baby names,” Aedion sing-songs.

_Please, goddess. If you pity me, you will strike me down now._

Evangeline gasps, “HAVE YOU CHOSEN ALREADY-“ She clears her throat then, giving a little nervous laugh. “I’m sorry, I got too excited then. Have you chosen their names yet?”

“Well,” Lysandra smiles at Aedion, a little sheepishly. “We believe so. How do you feel about… Aran and Eva?”

“Aran and Eva,” Evangeline sighs dreamily. “Oh, Lysandra! Those are beautiful.”

“How do you know it’s a boy and a girl?” I question, merely out of curiosity.

But Lysandra seems all too happy to oblige me.

“Well, Aedion has quite the sense,” she says, looking at her husband, light in her eyes.

For a moment, I briefly wonder if Evangeline looks at me like that, and my heart warms.

“You see, when you have lived as long as I have, you pick up things with these senses,” Aedion explains. “You begin learning how to distinct a female’s heartbeat from a male’s. How they breathe, even. I have an inkling, a very strong inkling, that is all I know.”

I read it before – how the Fae could pick up things like that; how their hearing and sense of smell could go beyond a human’s understanding of Nature itself. Some part of me envies him for it – I listen, fascinated, as he continues:

“It is almost like a human woman, I believe,” he says, “when they have an inkling. Our sense is just stronger. And we are right most of the time.”

“_Most_ of the time,” Lysandra winks.

“I like that,” Evangeline smiles. “And I love the names.”

Then they all look at me.

I am stunned for a few moments, that they care about what I have to say. That they actually _look_, waiting, for a reply. As if my answer has some weight.

They care, I think, a bit dizzily. They truly care.

“I…” I begin, and clear my throat. “I like them, too. Eva is quite beautiful. Aran is very uncommon.”

Aedion slaps me in the back and I almost fall over my bowl. “See?” He says to Mrs. Raven. “Told you they’d like them!”

Around the table there’s laughter, and happiness, and a strong feeling of _family_. And as I recover from that brute strength, as I look around, I realize I’m actually laughing with them.

And the most striking feeling of all – is that I feel as if I belong with them.

***

The carriage is loaded, three days later.

This time, a flock of light red curls brushes my nose as Evangeline turns her face to watch a bird fly off into the sunset.

With my arms around her waist, her back against my chest, she feels incredibly warm. One of her hand rises up high in the air, waving. A few meters away, from the doorway of the house, Lysandra and Aedion wave right back, happy as anyone can be.

Happy as we are.

Then the light of my life turns to me. “I think the next time we see them we will have little Aran and Eva with us.”

That smile – as wide as the world.

“You will be the most amazing godfather,” she laughs then, touching a hand to my heart.

I raise my brows. “To twins, imagine that.”

I still have no words for it – for the question Aedion had asked me personally, on our last day in Caraverre. I’d been waiting for Evangeline to pick up the last winter berries by the porch, watching her with the sort of wonder I imagine a child watching rain trickle down a window for the first time. His hand had been at my shoulder, and I had not moved away.

He’d asked, “Lysandra and I want you to be the godfather. And Evangeline the godmother.”

I’d had no words, even then.

He’d explained it: “Evangeline is our first daughter, our light, and we know how much she cares for you. I have no doubt in my heart, Hollin, that you are the reason I can still look upon my daughter, see her smile, and laugh, see her being happy. You protected and loved her. And I know you always will.”

I’d simply shaken my head, stunned, because-

Because all my life I thought I did not belong truly anywhere. I spent my childhood bitter, locked away, dreading the cruelty of my father, or the thing inside my father, hating the way my mother did not care, angry that everyone seemed to have a family while mine was constantly falling apart.

And now-

I understood it, in that moment.

Aedion considered me family. They all did.

I was forgiven, for all those years.

I was embraced, and now I was in the warmth.

“Only if you want it,” he smiled. “There are plenty of volunteers out there, let me tell you.”

“I accept it,” I responded, because it was the truth.

I wanted that trust he gave me. I wanted-

I wanted this family.

He patted my back again, and that was that.

Now, as I look down at Evangeline, I realize how truly wonderful life is.

“To twins,” she agrees, chuckling. “Oh, two little nightmares. Isn’t it wonderful?”

I watch her, the colour of her eyes, the never-fading scars on her cheeks, the pureness of her heart showing in every single spot where the light touched her face. “Yes,” I tell her, because it is the truest of truths. “Yes,” I say again. “It is the most wonderful thing of all, my love.”

TO BE CONTINUED

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Evangeline and Hollin’s story is coming to an end, but they are not going away! You can read about them in my next TOG + ACOTAR gen 2 fanfic: Suns and Stars, coming soon! <3


	6. Chapter 6

_6 months later…_

Aelin wove three little white flowers at the back of my hair, where my curls sit, neatly coiled. She made sure to push my hair away from my face, to show the soft blush at my cheeks. I attempt not to fix my eyes on the scars.

The Queen of Terrasen looks at me in the mirror. “You’re nervous.”

I release the fabric of my skirt, which I have been twisting between my fingers, in my lap, for a while. Aelin smiles, her eyes glinting.

“You’ve no reason to be,” she says softly.

“I know,” I say back, but it is not completely true – my mind is running at the speed of light, at the thought of having everyone stare, as I…

A gentle hand is placed at my shoulder. The Queen gives me a nod. “You are resplendent. Always were.”

I smile, knowing that, if it comes from her, then it must be true. I look at myself one last time in the mirror, and move off the chair. My gown falls to the ground. It is weightless.

I feel weightless.

Happy.

“I’m ready,” I tell her. And Aelin takes my hand.

***

The moment she sees me, Lysandra bursts into tears.

So does Aedion.

Dorian is sitting next to Manon, six-months-pregnant Manon, and I see his lips trembling.

I expect Manon to roll at her eyes at so many tearful faces but-

I cannot deny that even the Witch Queen’s eyes soften as she watches me enter the parlour, and not one word is let out of her lips as Lysandra takes me in her arms.

“I am very pregnant,” she announces, sobbing, “and very emotional. But know that you are the most beautiful bride I have ever seen.”

Aedion takes my hand.

“Stop,” I tell him, watching his face, my own throat closing. “You’ll all make me cry, and Aelin has spent hours on my face.”

Aedion lets out a chuckle, tearful, but pulls me into his arms, and squeezes me tight. Those hugs, those familiar bear hugs that always used to be a comfort to me, allow me to finally breathe a little.

“Evangeline,” Dorian says, as Aedion pulls away, his eyes a little red, but his smile as bright as the sun. “I wanted to be the first one to say it: welcome to the family.”

I wrap my arms around the King, my friend, my family, and hang on tight. “Thank you,” I tell him.

Then it is Manon staring at me, her eyes strong with deep meaning. She nods her head once, and says, “You deserve the world, little witchling. But this world will never deserve you.”

My first sob escapes me, and before I can think better of it, I pull Manon in for a hug.

She goes very still very quickly, but then I feel her hands at my back, and she allows me to cry, for those little seconds, and I let my embrace be a symbol of my gratefulness. To her – to all of them.

When I pull back, Manon blinks back whatever emotion I brought up, and stares at the mess that is Aedion and Lysandra in the corner. “Look what you have done, making the girl cry on her wedding day. Get your shit together.”

Before Aedion can retort – with something particularly unpleasant, I can only guess – the door opens, and Rowan himself pokes his head in. “Are we ready?”

He then stops, and smiles. “Evangeline,” he says, and sweeps me up in a hug that is half a twirl.

It makes me laugh as he places me right back down, the way the Prince gazes at me with gentle surprise. “I swear yesterday you were a little kid who would not sleep and keep everyone awake at night.”

“I know,” Aedion whimpers.

“Don’t be the one to make me cry as well,” I tell him. “Those two over there already did their job.”

“Right,” Rowan chuckles. “We are ready whenever you are.”

I breathe in, and look around the room. Aelin, Rowan, Lysandra, Aedion, Manon and Dorian.

Fenrys and now Vaughan waiting outside.

Lorcan and Elide.

Hollin.

My family.

I take another breath, just in case, and tell them, “Let’s go.”

***

The summer air is light and steady, the breeze carrying the scent of wildflowers. Caraverre is blooming. The world is shining.

Through the window of the manor, I see my family sitting around the oak tree, petals splattered on the ground in rainbow colours. A feast is already waiting for us here. A carriage is ready to take me and Hollin on our first trip to Ellywe.

I see him chatting with Rhiannon.

He wears baby blue – the blue of the skies, the blue of his eyes – and black trousers. A laurel leaf crown on his head, shining silver. He stands like a King, a slightly annoyed twist at the corner of his mouth as his niece laughs out loud.

My heart tightens in my chest. I wish to run to his arms.

“Evangeline.”

I turn, and see Aedion in his formal clothes, standing with his hands behind his back.

“You look dashing,” I tell him. “I can’t believe there isn’t any dirt on your shoes.”

He gives me a laugh, shaking his head. “You know Lys, and the power she holds over me.”

“Over _anyone_,” I correct, nodding, a smiling spreading on my lips.

He pauses, for just a second, his eyes moving to the window behind me, and falling back to mine not a second later. “If someone had told me,” he starts, a gentle smirk on his lips, full of mischief, “that someday I would watch that Havilliard boy falling in love, I would have lost my damn lungs because I would not stop laughing. And yet here we are.”

I smile, playfully pushing at his arm. “Leave him alone.”

“He’d fall to the ends of the world for you,” Aedion murmurs softly.

My throat tightens. I nod. “I know.”

“But so would you, for him, wouldn’t you?”

“I would,” I tell him without hesitation.

Aedion nods, and there is a long, tender pause between us. I walk into his arms, and let him wrap his arms around my frame, holding me tight against him.

“I am so proud,” Aedion whispers, his voice cracking a little. “So proud of you.”

I nod in thanks against his chest, unable to speak.

“No matter what happens,” he tells me. “You will always be my daughter. From that first moment you jumped at my back, as this scrawny eleven-year-old, trying to scare me, I knew it in my bones that you were meant to be _here_, right here, with us.” He squeezes me a little, and my chest feels like it will explode.

I hold him just as tight.

“Thank you,” I whisper to him. “For everything.”

When we break apart, Aedion gives me his arm. “Another adventure awaits, Princess.” 

I wipe at my cheeks for the second time that day, and smile at him. “Let’s go live it, then.”

***

Aedion and Lysandra walk me to him.

Hollin.

No one from court is here. No one unwanted. Just us, and our family, the ones we love and the ones that love us. When I reach him, Aedion and Lysandra kiss me on the cheek before leaving me to go sit at the front. His eyes follow mine, so filled with love that it stuns me for a second.

I realize he is smiling.

He’s never done it in front of this many people, I realize. But he’s smiling at me, lips spread wide, with teeth and all, with glittering eyes and a happy laugh stuck at his throat.

“You have yet to run away, I see,” he tells me in a whisper.

His fingers entwine with mine.

“I would not give you the satisfaction,” I challenge, squeezing his fingers.

He gives me a soft laugh, and touches my cheek with his free hand. If he minds that we are being watched, he does a very good job at hiding it.

“We will see, my darling,” he purrs.

Our ceremony is simple, in the shade of an oak tree, surrounded by family. To bind oneself to another, the words have to be spoken, and they have to hold true meaning. The binding only words if both parts are willing for it to work.

With me and Hollin, I don’t believe there’s any doubt.

He speaks first, surprising me:

“I bind myself to you,” he murmurs to me, eyes on mine, our hands clasped together, our hearts beating as one. “Heart to heart, soul to soul, mind to mind. I bind myself to you and make my life your own. I bind myself to you. For now, forever.”

I wonder if this life, or two hundred lives, are enough time to prove my love for him. I wonder if he feels my heart clinging to my ribcage, desperately wanting to be held by his hands. I wonder if he truly knows how deep this love goes.

I hope he knows.

When I think it is my turn, Hollin surprises me by adding:

“I was never good with words.” He looks up at me, and it is as if the world does not exist. There is only me and him, the shadow of the oak tree, the summer breeze and the scent of wildflowers. The touch of his hands on mine. “So, whatever will come out of my mouth next will most likely be a string of nonsensical sentences, but know that there have never been truer words, or truer feelings than these. Know that I am aware I was never an easy man to love, know that I am aware of how tainted my soul was, how my heart was filled to the brim with bitterness. But know that you are a light, Evangeline, a light at the end. I woke up every morning thinking _Who could possible stay_? But you did. You have loved me and allowed me to love you in return, and I will forever be indebted to the stars for having led you to me when I didn’t deserve it. From this day forth, whether this binding allows you to live as long as I will, or whether it allows me to live as long as you, whether we live a thousand years or fifty, whether the stars fall from the sky or whether they remain forever untouched, I am yours.”

I hear a loud sniffing sound from my right, and we both turn our heads to see Mrs. Raven quietly sobbing into a handkerchief.

“I’m sorry!” She mutters quietly.

A few of our family smile, while others downright laugh, and even Hollin cracks a smile at that.

I watch him as the words sink into me and into my very bones.

“Loving you,” I tell him, leading his hand to my scarred cheek, “is the easiest feeling in the world. There was never doubt in my mind – I loved you before I knew it, and adored you when I pretended you meant nothing. Love is never supposed to be a whirlwind, I learned. Love is calm, love is the night, it’s the gentle shadows, it’s golden, it’s you. It’s always been you.” I take a breath, kissing his palm, before saying: “It is why I want to bind myself to you. Heart to heart, soul to soul, mind to mind. I bind myself to you and make my life your own. I bind myself to you. For now, forever.”

Warmth swept over me like a comforting wave, my heart thudding once, twice, a third time, before returning to its normal rhythm. As we look at each other, I realize what it is. Our hearts falling into sync.

Hollin looks at me, a little unsettled, his gaze unwavering, his smile unfaltering. I realize I’m smiling, too. So much. My cheeks hurt. I might be crying.

I take his face, bend him down to take his lips.

He kisses me like it is the first time.

He kisses me, and it is like breaking the surface of the ocean and taking that much needed first breath.

There’s clapping and happy sounds and shouts and cheers and laughter. We break apart slowly, and turn to our family-

I watch them all.

Rhia sits with the Queen, her smile so much like her father’s – a little sneaky, but happy. Next to her Elide and Lorcan, three children around them – baby Ragnar watching the skies with the utmost interest, the oldest, Ferran, watching Aelin and Rowan’s daughter, Amara, from across the sitting area, and little Andrik, looking shy in his dapper coat, hands behind his back. Little baby Luna, her tuft of blond hair falling over her eyes, almost falling asleep in Vaughan’s arms. Fenrys’ smile. Then-

Lysandra and Aedion, their arms around each other, hope in their eyes.

Manon failing to hide the glint in her eyes.

Dorian downright crying once more.

Hollin, pulling me closer, his lips touching the top of my head.

Love isn’t a big enough word.

***

EPILOGUE

Hollin

I change clothes methodically fast, still unable to shake the warmth from my fingertips, and the new rhythm of my heart. It beats slower now. Calmer. I look at myself in the mirror.

Unchanged, and yet different.

Happiness makes for a strange, beautiful companion.

The door of my chambers creeps open, and a taunting knock sounds.

“Brother.”

Dorian closes the door behind him, radiating smugness. “I told you.”

I snort, fixing the collar of my shirt, watching him from the mirror. “How are you so sure?”

My brother sits on the bed, no crown adorning his head, his smirk spreading. “You felt it too, didn’t you?”

I pause, not wishing to respond to something I was not sure about.

“It was a 50/50 chance, right? Either you became mortal, or Evangeline became immortal.”

I would not have minded it either way. Neither of us would. Still-

“You can practically smell the immortality on Evangeline, how she changed,” Dorian says. “It turns out you and I will have to put up with each other for a lot longer than we expected.”

I turn to him, surprised that I am still grinning. “Don’t look so sad, brother. You might still end up killing me after all.”

Dorian shrugs. “I will leave that to Evangeline. It will be a lot more fun to watch, and less work for me.”

I shake my head at him, but before I can retort an equally witty response, he says, “I’m happy, Hollin. I’m happy for you.”

We fall into a serious silence, yet a comfortable one. It’s strange – I don’t remember the last time I didn’t feel like a lesser being near Dorian. The last time we actually behaved like brothers.

“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.

Dorian gets up from the bed, and pulls me into a hug before I can react.

I pause, before hugging him back.

“I’m sorry,” he says against my shoulder. “For all the times I was supposed to be there, and wasn’t. For not helping, for pushing you away like everybody else did.”

“It’s alright now,” I say, awkwardly. “I’m sorry for… well, being a pest.”

Dorian pulls away, smiling sadly. “You weren’t so bad.”

“Yes, I was.”

“Yeah,” he scratches the back of his neck. “You were.”

We both laugh, and it’s a strange thing, a wonderful thing.

I think I can get used to it.

“You’re married,” he says, like he cannot believe it.

“I don’t know why you sound so surprised,” I tell him. “You married a bloodthirsty witch. And you _procreated_ with her. _Twice_.”

Dorian rolls his eyes, pushing at my shoulder. “You love her so much.”

“No,” I say, frowning.

“You do,” he says. “And she loves you, you know.”

“She will rip your head off your shoulders if she hears you,” I mutter.

“Yeah,” Dorian says, almost dreamily.

We pause, comfortable in each other’s presence, before he tells me: “Before you return to Adarlan, I suggest you stop at Meah.”

I look up at him, cocking my head to the side. “Why?”

He smiles. “There’s a surprise there for both of you, if you want it.” He pauses, and then, as if he can’t contain himself anymore, he says: “We prepared you a palace. Away from court.”

When I blink in surprise, Dorian is quick to say:

“I know you hate court. I know how you despise everyone in it. You lose your mind everytime you have to attend a meeting or fake politeness. Now you don’t have to. This kingdom is yours as much as it is mine, but I want you to have a safe space, if you need it. At the northern coastline in Meah, the new palace is finished. I had it made six months ago. All around, you can see the ocean. It’s peaceful. Evangeline would like it – and I know you would like it, too.”

I have no words.

Dorian smiles gently. “Consider it a wedding gift.”

“A _palace_?”

His smirk is detestable. “Were you hoping for something grander?”

I pause. “You… didn’t have to do that.”

My brother nods. “I know. Like I said, it is there if you want it. If. You are welcome at court any day, if you wish. You don’t have to put down the crown, give up your title, or any of it.”

I imagine the smell of salt in the air, mornings with the windows open and Evangeline waking next to me. I imagine silence, and peacefulness. Happiness, unending.

I tell him, “That is more than what I deserve.”

“Don’t think like that. Just thank me.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you, Dorian.”

And when we hug again, I don’t want it to end. I cling to my brother, and repeat the words, just in case he needs to hear them again.

Once we are ready, we open the doors.

***

Outside, Evangeline is waiting with all our family around her. Everyone is talking at once. Before I can reach her, however, something small and white-haired stops me.

That something is my niece.

“I have something for you,” she declares.

“Oh?”

She hands me a note, very discreetly. “Do not open it now.”

“Alright.”

She pauses, and says, “So you married my best friend.”

“So?”

“So,” she says, “that’s kind of mean of you.” Rhiannon crosses her arms. “You’re leaving me.”

I pause. “I’m not leaving.”

She looks away, and I see that she’s trying to hold back tears. I blink, stunned.

“I thought you didn’t like me,” I say.

Rhiannon throws her hair off her shoulder, sighing irritably. “Well, you’re my uncle. My family. I have to like you.”

“No, you don’t. I don’t like lots of people in my family.”

“Yes, well,” she says, resigned. “I like you, so there’s that.”

Oh.

I see now what she is trying to tell me, in her own way.

I pause, and squat down in front of her, her note in my hand. She is trying very hard to not meet my eyes.

“We are not leaving you, Rhiannon,” I say to her. “You’re a pain in my ass, and an absolute devil, but I wouldn’t leave you for anything.”

Her jaw clenches as she looks up at the sky. “Promise.”

I touch her arm, allowing myself to show her this much of affection. It’s what she deserves. “I promise.”

My niece throws her arms around my neck, and I think that I’ve had my fair share of hugging to last me two lifetimes, but I still wrap my arms around her. Rhiannon quickly pulls away, looking diplomatic.

“Right,” she says. “I can’t be seen hugging you now, it’ll ruin my reputation.”

“What reputation?” I scoff. “You’re a child.”

She eyes me up and down, offended. “I’m your future Queen,” she snaps back, and twirls around, leaving me baffled and frankly amused.

When I manage to find my light, she is grinning up at me, chuckling, saying, “Where have you been?”

“Trying to find you,” I tell her, pulling her to me.

Our family waves us goodbye as we get into our carriage. Evangeline is grasping my hand. I kiss her knuckles, and she smiles, and it feels like a beginning.

As she waves out the window, I unfold the crumpled note.

Silently, I read:

_ Once, when I asked you to play with me, and you said no, I cried. I went to Evangeline and I told her I hated you. Evangeline asked me not to hate you, and she was very nice about it. I asked her why, and she said that we shouldn’t hate anybody, less of all you._

_ I thought she was just being nice, but now I believe Evangeline._

_ I didn’t hate you. And I don’t hate you now either._

_ I don’t think anybody does._

_ And if they do, I will put them in chains when I’m Queen._

_ I’m glad you married my best friend and I’m glad you’re my uncle. Please don’t disappear. I want to keep annoying you._

_ Your niece,_

_RHIA._

_P.S.: I was the one that got water all over your expensive journal collection… sorry…_

_P.P.S.: Also, when you lost your expensive ink pen, I actually stole it. I would’ve given it back to you but I lost it._

_P.P.P.S.: Remember you’re not allowed to be mad at me, since I am your future Queen._

“What is it?” Evangeline says, turning to me in surprise.

I’m still laughing.

“What?” She asks.

“It’s just…” I shake my head, my laughter fading, my smile, my happiness remaining. I fold the note into my pocket. “I love you.”

She chuckles, kissing me gently on the lips, before resting her head on my shoulder. Our carriage moves. She placed her hand atop her heart.

“And I love you.”

***

Waves in the distance. Salt in the air.

I wake with hands moving gently over my back, and a gentle weight on the back of my legs. I dig my head further into the pillow, groaning slightly.

I hear the softest of laughs.

“Why are you awake?” I murmur. “It’s so early.”

She leans in, her chest against my back. “It’s not early. It’s morning.”

“_Exactly_.”

Evangeline’s lips trace the curve of my ear, before moving to my shoulder. “I miss you. Please wake up?”

I smile into the softness of the sheets, and turn suddenly, allowing her to fall into her back on the mattress.

Evangeline smiles at me, as I move to hover above her. “How rude,” I tell her, “to wake up your husband every morning like this. How very rude.”

“I really have no manners, do I?” She rolls her eyes. “Such tragedy. How could you ever marry such a lady?”

“Goddess only knows,” I murmur, touching my lips to hers.

She melts into me, arms pulling me against her, legs wrapping around my waist…

A beating of wings makes her break from my kiss, her attention going to the open floor to ceiling window.

Evangeline gasps, and moves away from me to the window. I groan, sinking into the mattress, missing her warmth.

“The raven arrived!” She says, taking the little note from the horrendous creature. I swear it looks straight at me then, mocking.

“What does it say?” I turn, watching her come back to bed.

Evangeline sits next to me, and gasps. “Eva. Aran. They’re here. Lysandra…” she keeps reading. And sighs, relieved. “They’re well. All of them. Healthy.”

I smile, “So Aedion was right after all.”

Evangeline chuckles, nodding. “He was. He really was. Eva… from Evangeline. And Aran, from the hero of the stories. I can’t wait to see them.”

“We should go today,” I tell her, touching her cheek. “Shall we pack?”

Evangeline hops off the bed with a nod, and practically jumps around the room. I watch her from the bed, my heart bursting at the sight.

Peace.

Happiness, unending.

THE END.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: That’s it, you guys! Evangeline and Hollin are living their happily ever after, and now our gen 2 truly begins! As always, thank you for staying and reading. Thank you for loving these characters as much as I do, thank you for your requests, your lovely comments and messages and for always being so incredibly kind. You are my motivation.
> 
> I’m bringing our old faves and my tog + acotar gen 2 characters into the sequel, Suns and Stars, coming tomorrow! I hope you’ll like it!


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